Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema: Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge (Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy) 1137461659, 9781137461650

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PALGRAVE FILM STUDIES AND PHILOSOPHY

Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge Matilda Mroz

Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy Series Editors Catherine Constable Milburn House University of Warwick Coventry, UK Andrew Klevan St Annes College University of Oxford St Annes College Oxford, UK

This series offers a Film Studies centred approach to philosophy. In the light of the increasing numbers of volumes appearing in the fast-­developing field of film-philosophy, it is fruitful to distinguish between those that are designed to introduce students to philosophy through the use of popular film – the films acting as a bridge to the subject area of Philosophy – and those that critically consider the myriad ways in which films might be said to ‘do’ philosophy. Importantly, within both approaches, the term ‘film’ is ambiguous, standing for specific film texts and, less directly, for the subject area of Film Studies itself. Numerous philosophers writing in this new field conjoin philosophy with a discussion of specific films, following a template drawn from aesthetics in which philosophy is applied to a particular art form. As a result, the discipline of Film Studies is oddly absent from such works of film-philosophy. This series aims to redress the balance by offering a Film Studies centred approach to philosophy. This truly interdisciplinary series draws on the long history of philosophical debates within Film Studies, including aesthetic evaluation, style, genre, representation, and the image (its properties and processes), placing them centre stage. The series would encourage philosophising about areas of aesthetic evaluation, style, genre, representation, and the image through engagement with the films and the use of evidence from them. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15761

Matilda Mroz

Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge

Matilda Mroz University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy ISBN 978-1-137-46165-0    ISBN 978-1-137-46166-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom.

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a research project that developed over a number of years. For their support in launching the project, I thank the British Academy, which funded initial field work and archival research in Poland between 2013 and 2015. I am extremely grateful for their further grant of a Mid-Career Fellowship in 2019 that gave me the time and space needed to complete this book. I would also like to thank Palgrave Macmillan, the Polish National Film Archive (particularly Adam Wyżyński) and Monika Żydkowska for their assistance in the early stages of the work. An earlier version of some of the material that appears in Chap. 4 was published in 2016 as ‘Spectral Cinema: Anamorphosis and the Haunted Landscapes of Aftermath and The Devil’s Backbone’, in Haunted Landscapes, ed. Niamh Downing and Ruth Heholt, 41–57, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the editorial team. An earlier version of some of the material that appears in Chap. 5 was also published in 2016 as ‘Framing Loss and Figuring Grief in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida’, Screening the Past 41, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the editorial team. Over the years, this research has been enriched by inspiring exchanges with numerous people; thank you to Anna Backman Rogers, Stanley Bill, Zuzanna Bogumił, Jenny Chamarette, Marta Hawkins, Ben Highmore, Barry Langford, Alisa Lebow, Tomasz Łysak, Sarah Maltby, Ewa Mazierska, Joanna Michlic, Sally Munt, Isil Önol, Małgorzata Pakier, Agnieszka Piotrowska, Stacey Pitsillides, Małgorzata Radkiewicz, David Sorfa, David Trotter, Jay Winter and Joanna Zylinska, amongst others. I would like to thank friends and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, the Department of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, the v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Department of Art History at the University of Sydney, the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, and the FilmPhilosophy board and conference organisers for creating the stimulating environments in which this research took shape. I am particularly grateful to those who shared their own work with me as I have been writing this book, including Thomas Austin, Lucy Bolton, Alan Cholodenko, Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn, Piotr Cieplak, Zuzanna Dziuban, James Harvey, Elżbieta Janicka, Karina Jarzyńska, Maria Kobielska, David Martin-Jones, Joanna Rydzewska, Roma Sendyka, Aleksandra Szczepan and Tomasz Żukowski. Their brilliant scholarship has had a transformative impact on my work. I feel extremely fortunate to have been part of the Jewish Studies Group at the University of Sussex, and I thank the group members for giving up their evenings to watch and discuss the films that I have written about here. I would like to say a special thank you to those who read chapter drafts towards the end of the writing process, including Michael Lawrence, Libby Saxton, Gareth R.  Theobald and Victoria Walden. Their words of advice and encouragement have been invaluable. I am beyond grateful to Adam Wyatt, who read and listened to everything and whose own work on ecology and landscape gave new life to this book. Many thanks to Catherine Constable and Andrew Klevan for including the book in the Film Studies and Philosophy series at Palgrave Macmillan and for their insights along the way. Thank you to Emily Wood at Palgrave, for her kindness and patience in overseeing this work through to publication. I am immensely grateful for the enduring support of two extraordinary women: Katie Grant and Emma Wilson. I could not ask for more generous or inspirational mentors, and I thank them both profusely. Finally, thank you to my family, not only for their words of support, but also for their real material contributions to this work. I particularly thank Grace for being my film festival companion, Natalia for her skilful work on the images in this book, and Peter for being my most valued research assistant, editor, archivist, driver and expedition guide.

Contents

1 Polish Aftermath Cinema: Unwanted Knowledge, Unwanted Images  1 2 Earth and Bone: Framing Posthumous Materialities 45 3 Posthumous Landscapes and the Earth-­Archive: Archaeology, Ethics and Birthplace 91 4 Aftermath’s Cinematic Séance: Anamorphosis, Spectrality and Sentient Matter129 5 The Fabric with Its Rend: Framing Grief, Materialising Loss and Ida’s Temporalities167 6 A Film Found on a Scrapheap: Abjection, Informe and It Looks Pretty from a Distance211 7 Conclusion: Not About, But After251 Bibliography263 Index285

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

The forest in It Looks Pretty framed as a potentially lethal trap 65 Aftermath: landscape with matzevot 67 Aftermath’s witness testifies before exhumed human remains 75 Franek seen through the trees of the forest in Aftermath79 Watching the bonfire with It Looks Pretty’s villagers 79 Józef’s crucified body displayed for diegetic and non-diegetic bystanders in Aftermath136 Aftermath: the ruined ancestral home as posthumous environment141

Figs. 4.3 and 4.4 Reading and touching archival matter in Aftermath143 Fig. 4.5 Anti-Semitic graffiti as a stain in Aftermath’s rural landscape 150 Figs. 4.6 and 4.7 The gravestones and the burning barn in Aftermath addressing us 154 Fig. 5.1 Spilled sugar frames a void in Ida168 Fig. 5.2 Ida: Wanda’s photograph of Róz˙a and Ida 174 Fig. 5.3 Light framed by shadows in Wanda’s living room in Ida179 Fig. 5.4 Ida: the negated home 183 Fig. 5.5 Ida’s posthumous environment as inhospitable landscape 185 Fig. 5.6 Ida: light framed by shadows in Wanda’s car 188 Fig. 5.7 Ida face-to-face with Jesus 192 Fig. 5.8 Wanda touching her photographs in Ida196 Figs. 5.9 and 5.10 Ida: Róz˙a’s stained-glass window, and its light touching Ida 197 Fig. 6.1 Paweł’s ruined home in It Looks Pretty218 Fig. 6.2 It Looks Pretty: narrating atrocity through mouthfuls of food 227

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List of Figures

Figs. 6.3 and 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8

Light blistering through It Looks Pretty’s frames 229 The rural environment as scrapheap in It Looks Pretty231 It Looks Pretty: Mirek’s father becoming-scrap 232 Unidentifiable trash in the heat of It Looks Pretty’s rotten sun 235 It Looks Pretty’s rural landscape, pretty from a distance 238

CHAPTER 1

Polish Aftermath Cinema: Unwanted Knowledge, Unwanted Images

‘If He Knew This, He Wouldn’t Be Alive’: Unwanted Knowledge At the beginning of Agnieszka Arnold’s documentary …Where is My Older Son Cain? (Poland, 1999; henceforth Cain), a typewritten report is shown on the screen. Reading from it, a narrator recounts how, during WWII, Catholic Poles gathered together the Jewish residents of a small Polish town called Jedwabne and forced them to clean the streets. In the process, some of them were beaten to death.1 The film cuts to show a woman, identified as Janina Biedrzycka from Jedwabne, who insists that Poles would never carry out any violence unless under orders from the Nazi German occupiers. Another cut returns us to the document and the voice-­ over reads on, describing how two Jewish women had tried to drown themselves and their children in a pond. One of the women struggled for hours, the voice-over relates, while Polish ‘hooligans’ made a ‘spectacle’ of this and jeered at her from the bank.2 A sepia-coloured image of a large pond with a grassy bank is briefly shown onscreen, before the film cuts back to Biedrzycka, who cries: ‘This is nonsense!’ She claims that the ‘cunning Jews’ drowned themselves ‘from fear’ because their husbands had collaborated with the invading Russian forces, and then escaped. As she talks, we see a panning shot of the same pond, this time in colour. For another minute or so, the film continues to place the testimony of the document in opposition to Biedrzycka’s rebuttals. The voice-over describes © The Author(s) 2020 M. Mroz, Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7_1

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how some Polish men forced all the Jewish residents of the town into a barn belonging to Biedrzycka’s father. The barn was set alight, and everyone inside burned alive. Twenty-two-year-old Szmul Wasersztajn escaped and was later hidden by a Catholic Pole. Biedrzycka angrily retorts that ‘the Jew is writing nonsense. If he knew this, he wouldn’t be alive. He’s only writing this out of spite. If a Jew is writing this.’ The final image in this opening sequence is of a monument in Jedwabne, which declares that the German Gestapo and SS committed the massacre of the town’s Jewish residents. There is no mention of Polish participation. A filmmaker working primarily with Polish state television, Arnold had come across Wasersztajn’s testimony towards the end of the 1980s in the Ringelblum Archive in Warsaw. Wasersztajn’s description of the massacre at Jedwabne, which occurred over the course of a day on July 10, 1941, contains graphic details of brutal violence and torture that some of the gentile Poles inflicted on the Jewish people that they had lived alongside for generations.3 We read of rapes, beheadings, and stonings, as well as the event that would later become a visual icon of Polish wartime violence: the burning of still-living people in a barn. We read of the subsequent desecration of the corpses as gold teeth were ripped from bodies, and of the looting of the victims’ goods, property and land. Confronted with this distressing testimony, Arnold attempted to verify it over a number of years before eventually travelling to Jedwabne. There she found, to her surprise, that the residents not only remembered the atrocity very well, but also were eager to talk about it (Litka 2011, 887). All one had to do was ask, but, for decades, hardly anybody had. And thus, while the knowledge of the crime was passed down from generation to generation in the Jedwabne area (though there was not a single, unified version of the history that everyone accepted), it had failed to reach a broader public awareness. This was to change dramatically between 2000 and 2001 when the Jedwabne crime entered public consciousness, in what was frequently expressed as a moment of ‘shock’ and sudden revelation. It was not Arnold’s film that catapulted the unwanted knowledge of Polish perpetration of crimes against Jewish people into the public domain.4 The film attracted very little notice; no one ‘wanted to notice’ it (Żmijewska 2009). However, Arnold had shared her raw footage from Jedwabne with the Polish-American scholar Jan T. Gross. It was his subsequently written history Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941 (published in Polish in 2000 and English in 2001), that publicised the massacre. Neighbours contravened the ways in which

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Holocaust history had been understood in Poland for decades. Traditional historical and cultural narratives highlighted the actions of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations, those rewarded by Israel’s Yad Vashem for rescuing Jewish people during a brutal German occupation, despite the death penalty for doing so. It was widely understood that where assistance was not possible, Catholic Poles acted as innocent witnesses to the extermination of their Jewish neighbours by Nazi Germany. Unsurprisingly, then, the history of Jedwabne, in which a number of Polish citizens tortured and murdered their Jewish neighbours, provoked ‘the most prolonged and far-reaching of any discussion of the Jewish issue in Poland since the Second World War’ (Polonsky and Michlic 2004, xiii). The emergence of this unwanted knowledge caused immense controversy and upheaval that continues, twenty years later, to reverberate across politics, the legal system, academic scholarship and cultural production. The precise details as well as the broader implications of what occurred at Jedwabne continue to be disputed. Nevertheless, the awareness that Poles had been involved in the massacre in a way that had previously been unthinkable for many people engendered ‘such a potent caesura that one could speak of Poland “before and after” Jedwabne’ (Zubrzycki 2013, 99). As with many such apparently total breaks with the past, one can find threads of continuity between ‘now’ and ‘then’. Indeed, this book will outline how, in the aftermaths of unwanted knowledge, various aspects of ‘past’ mechanisms of violence, exclusion and othering persist in the present. Nevertheless, the book will use the terms ‘after Jedwabne’ and ‘post-­Jedwabne’ as convenient shorthands for the cultural and critical landscape that developed as a result of the revelations concerning Polish wartime perpetration.5 The first two chapters of this book will indicate a few landmarks in this controversial landscape. However, this is not a book ‘about’ Jedwabne, nor even about the vast scale of cultural production engendered by new Holocaust histories in Poland, though these form a significant context for the research outlined here. Instead, the book conducts a close analysis of three fiction films that have emerged in the post-Jedwabne climate and that refer to Polish perpetration of murders of Jewish people in rural landscapes and small towns during the Holocaust. These three films, Aftermath/Pokłosie (Władysław Pasikowski, Poland/Russia/Netherlands 2012), Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland/ Denmark/France/UK 2013), and It Looks Pretty From A Distance/Z Daleka Widok Jest Piękny (Wilhelm  Sasnal and Anka  Sasnal, Poland 2011; henceforth It Looks Pretty) emerged within a few years of each

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other during the liberal-conservative coalition government led by Poland’s Civic Platform.6 This book will also analyse one documentary film, Birthplace/Miejsce Urodzenia (Paweł Łoziński, Poland 1992), which preceded the Jedwabne revelations but which has become a significant precursor for the films that followed. Although I draw on insights from history and historiography, Holocaust and genocide studies, cultural and memory studies, sociology, anthropology and other fields, this research essentially emerges from film studies, especially in its intersections with theory and philosophy. This book will analyse how unwanted knowledge related to Polish perpetration and bystanding is thematised and enacted through each film’s cinematic staging of processes of investigating, reading, and viewing. The four films, while differing in production, structure, genre, and audience, share a significant feature: none of them attempt to reconstruct or visualise the Jedwabne killings or other murders of Jewish people committed by non-­ Jewish  Poles. None of them are even set during the Holocaust or WWII.  Instead, they stage the difficult processes of ‘coming-to-know’ these histories in their aftermaths. The term ‘coming-to-know’, which is deployed throughout this book, is an awkward one, and thus apt for the various uncomfortable and disjunctive processes of framing and reframing, acknowledging and disavowing, listening and silencing, that were engendered in the post-Jedwabne climate. Drawing on epistemological and ethical frameworks derived from Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-­ Huberman, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, Kaja Silverman and others, the book will consider how the films that constitute part of Poland’s ‘aftermath cinema’ thematise and enact attempts to make meaning from and narrativise unwanted knowledge, and stage possibilities for visibilising, vocalising and taking responsibility for it.

‘A Breach in the History Conceived’: …Where Is My Older Son Cain? The short sequence about Jedwabne in Cain represents a crucial moment in the emergence of unwanted knowledge concerning the massacre, though it has been overshadowed by Gross’s Neighbours. I want to spend some time unpacking it here, for it encapsulates some key issues also raised by other cinematic engagements with Polish perpetration and bystanding. We can begin, first of all, with what is not present. There are no

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reconstructions of the crime, nor archival images of the events. This is not simply a choice made by Arnold; no existing archival images of the rural murders of Jewish people by non-Jewish Poles during the Holocaust, either as they unfolded or of their immediate aftermaths, are currently known to researchers (I will return to this point shortly).7 The dearth of images of mass violence recurs frequently as a concern in studies of global genocides and state sponsored killings, and has occupied a key position in debates around the ‘representability’ of the Holocaust. As Saxton has noted, discussion of Holocaust representation has moved through a number of permutations. Moral prohibitions on representing so-called ‘ineffable’ or ‘unimaginable’ events have come to be seen with suspicion in the past few decades (Saxton 2008, 7; see also Walden 2019, 20). In defending the public exhibition of four photographs showing victims of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman (2008, 3) wrote: in order to know, we must imagine for ourselves […] let us not invoke the unimaginable. Let us not shelter ourselves by saying that we cannot, that we could not by any means, imagine it to the very end. We are obliged to that oppressive imaginable.8

I invoke this debate around Holocaust representation in the context of Jedwabne not to position the latter as a new manifestation of the unimaginable or unrepresentable, but rather to indicate this book’s interest in how Polish filmmakers have ‘imagined’ and imaged instances of wartime violence against Jewish Poles, shaping their films around a lack of archival images of Polish perpetration. The book seeks to question what it is that we might come to ‘know’ from these films, and how that ‘knowledge’ is thematised and structured. How might a desire to ‘shelter ourselves’ from unwanted knowledge and unwanted images manifest itself in the context of filmic allusions to Polish perpetration and complicity? And what structures of obligation might be thematised in and forged through these films? For Didi-Huberman, the images from Auschwitz contribute to knowledge through a process of ‘montage’ (2008, 120). He uses this cinematographic term to describe the arrangement of the four images side-by-side, as well as their placement in dialogue with other testimonies and images. Such correspondences seem to visibilise thought, as though montage shows thinking in the process of occurring. Montage thus both performs and encourages a ‘readability’ of the images (2008, 120).9 This process of

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reading, he specifies, does not ‘hasten to conclude or to close’ discussion, but rather seeks to open up the multiplicity of histories (2008, 121). The opening sequence of Cain also works through montage, most obviously by presenting a collision between different ways of framing and interpreting a historical event. On the one hand, for example, Wasersztajn’s testimony suggests that Catholic Poles were collectively the perpetrators of mass murder. On the other hand, their responsibility is refuted by Biedrzycka. She does not deny Polish participation in violence, but attempts to justify Polish attitudes by reference to a particularly potent association often made  in Poland between Jewishness and Communism, expressed in the pejorative  term ‘żydokomuna’ (sometimes translated as Judeo-communism). According to this interpretation, Jewish Poles collaborated with Soviet security forces to deport Catholic Poles to Siberia during the war (and hence pogroms, such as occurred at Jedwabne, were an act of revenge).10 Cain’s montage not only suggests a conflict between different interpretations of the Jedwabne crime, but also presents a collision between three different kinds of images that might be ‘read’ or might proffer ‘knowledge’: the archival document, the ‘witness’ (though this term will need to be interrogated) and the contemporary landscape. All three of these elements are significant to the films discussed in this book. For Didi-­ Huberman, archival material has the potential to irrupt into previous ways of conceptualising history, to form a ‘breach in the history conceived’, requiring us to produce a ‘rethought history of the event in question’ (2008, 99). This seems particularly apt for thinking about Jedwabne, where the retrieval of Wasersztajn’s testimony from the archive, reproduced in Gross’s Neighbours, provoked a rupture within Polish histories of the Holocaust. In the aftermath, scholars would frequently point to the ways in which documentation of Polish violence was always present in the archives, but was neglected or deliberately not utilised (Żukowski 2018b, 389). This book will consider how the presence of this dormant material, which, when it emerges, forces us to reframe reality and history, has been publicly discussed in ways that recall the conceptualisation of anamorphosis. In Lacan’s reading of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533), he describes how an apparent stain that appears at the corner of the frame when it is looked at straight-on becomes, when viewed obliquely or awry, a skull that irrupts onto the visual field (1986, 88). The skull, always present in the frame but not properly seen, forces us to revise our understanding of both seeing and knowing. My use of the concept in this book is mobilised not to present a psychoanalytic reading of Polish society,

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nor to suggest that ‘history’ is something that simply waits to be discovered by the historian. Instead, I draw on anamorphosis as a structure of knowing and seeing that can be traced across historical texts, public discussion, and visual engagements with Polish violence. As Derrida and others did before him, Didi-Huberman notes the tensions that arise from different expectations of archival material.11 ‘The archive is by no means the pure and simple “reflection” of the event, nor its pure and simple “evidence”’, he writes; instead, the archive is ‘essentially lacunary’ (2008, 99). But this does not mean that we must ‘expel “all of the real” from the archive’ (2008, 101). Issues related to the legibility and ‘difficult materiality’ of archival material are suggested by the ways in which Cain’s archival document is presented as an image framed for viewing (Didi-Huberman citing Arlette Farge 2008, 98). Sections of the document fill the entire screen and particular passages are enlarged, as though mimicking a process of close reading, and placing the viewer in the position of an investigator. The film highlights the materiality of the yellowed document as something we can almost touch. This book will return to different ways in which archives are figured as material, while material environments and landscapes are figured as archival. Cain’s ‘witness’, Biedrzycka, is also framed as an image to be studied. She does not face the camera directly, but is seen in profile, encouraging our scrutiny. Like the archival document, the image of Biedrzycka becomes one that we might ‘read’, and also troubles legibility. After Jedwabne, the figure of the innocent, distanced Holocaust witness fundamental to Polish self-conceptualisation has come under increasing strain, which Cain gestures to in embryonic form. The record of the violence in Jedwabne that is read by the voice-over describes not only acts of direct perpetration, but also a matrix of complicity around them. We hear, for example, that large groups of people participated in the audiovisual spectacle of Jewish suffering (the jeering crowds watching the drowning women). As presented by this document, these can hardly be said to be distanced witnesses, and there are slippages between acts of viewing and acts of perpetration. How might we read the relationships between those who directly inflicted violence and those who ‘only’ watched? What is the ethical resonance of standing by and looking in this situation? How should we think about the complicity of someone who was involved in the atrocity in other ways, such as the owner of the barn in which people burned to death?12 How might we treat the ‘testimony’ of such individuals and the descendants who defend them?

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The following chapters will describe how certain post-Jedwabne films have turned the camera away from images of Jewish suffering, familiar from visual cultures of the Holocaust, and towards, instead, those who previously watched. The ‘witnesses’ have been reconceptualised as threatening bystanders, jeering crowds, and complicit neighbours. The position of the ‘witness’ to the Holocaust that film and its viewers have frequently been placed in is also affected by this literal and figurative turn towards onlookers.13 Since Jewish suffering and death as it unfolded during the Holocaust is not reconstructed in any of the films, our own ‘witnessing’ of these events is also obstructed. Instead, structures of active looking and their entanglement with mechanisms of power are visibilised, and spaces of self-reflection, wherein we might interrogate our own processes of looking, are opened up. The third kind of image that the film seems to encourage us to ‘read’ is that of the landscape, which is presented in two ways: as a sepia-coloured archival photograph, and as a moving image taken from the perspective of someone casting a searching gaze across the pond. Such images are part of a broader pattern of Holocaust fiction and documentary film where a site of violence is returned to in the present day.14 It is not uncommon for such sites to be discussed in terms of emptiness and belatedness, evoking a feeling that, as Baer has written, we have arrived ‘too late’ (2002, 63). Baer discusses the photography of overgrown death sites as indexing an experience of ‘encountering nothing in the inhospitable terrain’ (2002, 74). In this particular example from Cain, there seem to be no traces of the event in the landscape, nor any commemorative indicators that might mark it as a space of torture and death. Sendyka (2013) has used the term ‘non-sites of memory’ to refer to such unmarked sites of Holocaust suffering in Poland, adapting terminology used by Pierre Nora and Claude Lanzmann. Such spaces feature heavily in the four films under discussion. The turns towards forensics, archaeology, the posthumanities and the sciences in Holocaust scholarship have encouraged us to look at such sites in new ways, particularly where they contain human remains. Decomposing human matter interacts with soil, plants, and insect life to form specific posthumous environments that are not ‘empty’, but rather replete with different forms of transformative agency. Chapter 2 will draw together discussion of socio-political systems of power and violence with posthuman approaches to ecosystems. In Cain, the history of Jedwabne occupies only a rather opaque three-­ and-­ a-half minute sequence of a film that ends up being a wider

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exploration of Polish–Jewish relations during the war. Although the film does not avoid exploring anti-Semitism, it also presents more familiar narratives in which Poles rescued their Jewish co-citizens. We do not return to the questions of Polish perpetration with which the film began. However, to refer back to the parameters of the ‘representability’ debate, this is not because such acts are necessarily unimaginable, but because they are subject to politically motivated evasion and censorship. Cain’s producers refused to release the film until Arnold dramatically shortened the Jedwabne sequence (Litka 2001). At an early production screening, Arnold was told that Poland was not ready for this ‘legacy’ (Litka 2001). The Jedwabne section of Cain thus occupies a strange position in relation to the rest, as though it were a radioactive particle in an otherwise familiar landscape, or an undigested fragment: there, but not quite absorbed. The sequence itself is a ‘breach in the history conceived’ (Didi-­ Huberman 2008, 99); it breaks a silence, while suggesting how much more might yet be muted, not because the material is inherently unrepresentable, but because it is unwanted. We are not only concerned, then, with a series of historical events (wartime violence, massacres and looting), but with the continual reverberation in the present of mechanisms of silencing, prejudice and exclusion. This continuity is suggested by Biedrzycka’s anti-Semitism decades after members of her parents’ generation murdered their Jewish neighbours. It will be suggested in the responses to Gross who comes to occupy the position of the ‘lying Jew’ attacked by Biedrzycka, and it was indicated in the accusations that, by making Cain, Arnold was ‘adopting a Jewish perspective’ and thereby ‘wounding the Polish nation’ (Litka 2001). It is succinctly expressed by journalist Anna Bikont, who documented these contemporary mechanisms at work in Jedwabne after the pogrom became public knowledge and was herself subject to intimidation and abuse. ‘I have the absurd sense that history is repeating itself’, she wrote in 2001, and, upon returning to the town in 2012, ‘in Jedwabne, nothing has changed’ (2015, 160).15

‘The Veil Finally Falls From Our Eyes’: Gross’s Neighbours When Gross watched Arnold’s raw footage from Cain in the 1990s, it was not the first time that he had come across the story of Jedwabne. Gross had used the testimony of Wasersztajn to suggest ‘how Polish neighbours

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mistreated their Jewish cocitizens’ in earlier work (2003, 21). However, as he explains in the opening pages of Neighbours, it did not occur to him to take literally Wasersztajn’s claim that all the Jewish residents of Jedwabne burned alive that day (‘I must have read this as a hyperbolic trope’) until he viewed Arnold’s footage, and particularly the interview with Biedrzycka (2003, 22). In the opening pages of Neighbours, Gross repeats three times the difficulty of comprehending Wasersztajn’s testimony, and his own inertia in front of it (Zylinska 2005, 108). After watching Cain, however, he describes how ‘the veil finally falls from [my] eyes and [I] realise that what has so far been unimaginable is precisely what happened’.16 Gross is not clear what exactly it was about the filmed footage that sparked this revelation; whether, for example, it was the interview’s content or its filmic framing that allowed him to see beyond the ‘veil’ of familiar historical frameworks. Zylinska suggests that it may have been the latter. Cain allowed Gross to approach Jedwabne ‘at one remove’, she argues, ‘through the mediation of cinematic material’ (2005, 109). Where the words of archival documents evoked for him ‘disbelief, doubt and miscomprehension’, the image, Zylinska writes, brought Gross to a ‘knowledge’ that came ‘through an act of seeing the event performed before his own eyes’ (2005, 109). What Gross has seen in Arnold’s film is not a contemporary reconstruction of Jedwabne, which Arnold did not attempt, but rather the ways in which elements of this event persist into the present. Biedrzycka’s verbal attack on ‘the Jew’ reveals quite clearly that the processes of ‘othering’ continue to operate in the town. From the very beginning of Gross’s work, then, and thus at the inception of the extensive transformation that it wrought, there is an intertwining of the orders of knowledge that emerge as cinema, archive and historical text refer in different ways to the same atrocity. Gross draws on the vocabulary of the ‘unimaginable’ only to argue that it was through the act of finally seeing a series of audiovisual filmic frames that brought him to an epistemological revelation. There are echoes here of Didi-Huberman (‘in order to know, we must imagine for ourselves’ (2008, 3)). The analyses of the films in this book will consistently return to the question of what they might allow us to finally ‘see’ through the particular configuration of the cinematic frame. Neighbours, the consequence and product of the veil falling from Gross’s eyes, was a relatively short history of the humiliation, torture, immolation, and looting that some of the Polish residents of Jedwabne inflicted on their Jewish neighbours. Gross characterised it as standing

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‘askew’ of traditional WWII history (2003, 11). One could say, to use the language of anamorphosis, that it stands awry of the dominant historical framing, challenging this picture from the margins. For a number of scholars, the history unfolded by Neighbours was not simply a correctional fragment that one could insert back into a historical vision of Polish–Jewish relations; rather, it required a complete reformulation of the foundational narrative of Poland under (and, indeed, before and after) German occupation (Żukowski 2017, 264).

After Such Knowledge? The moment of shocking revelation that Gross describes in Neighbours was echoed many times upon the book’s publication as the public struggled to accept this new, unwanted, knowledge.17 Bikont, working at the liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, had difficulty convincing her editor, Adam Michnik, to allow her to print the results of her investigation into Jedwabne. Michnik, himself Jewish and hardly unaware of anti-Semitism in his country, would later sum up the situation by stating that ‘it is difficult to describe the extent of th[e] shock’ of Jedwabne; ‘an average Polish reader couldn’t believe that something like this could have happened’ (Michnik 2001). This moment of what Zubrzycki describes as a ‘narrative shock’ ‘forcefully exposed not only that Poles were not main victims of the Second World War, but that they were in fact the perpetrators of some of its horror’ (2013, 99).18 The intense controversy sparked by Neighbours flared up again at each new event related to the pogrom, such as the presidential apology on the 60th anniversary of the atrocity in 2001, the erection of a new memorial at Jedwabne and its defacements (for example, with the words ‘they burned easily’), and the official investigation into the crime by the state Institute of National Remembrance.19 The two decades that have followed the publication of Neighbours have seen an outpouring of scholarship formulating new hypotheses about the attitudes and actions of Poles during the Holocaust. Some of this work by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and others has collectively been termed the ‘New School of Thinking About the Shoah’ (Grudzińska-­ Gross 2019, 14) or the ‘New Polish School of Holocaust Scholarship’.20 There are points of divergence and convergence within this broad range of work and I can only briefly sketch its parameters here. However, outlining the reframing of this history will help to shed light on the reconceptualisation of power relations and networks of looking that the films under

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discussion mobilise. They look differently at the webs of complicity and violence that persist in the aftermaths of crimes. Subsequent chapters will explore how the films visibilise structures of active looking through what I term the ‘gaze of the neighbour’, and draw attention to the ‘impossibility of the neutrality of spectatorship’, including our own (Aaron 2007, 106). Gross’s Neighbours initiated a shift of attention from concentration camps and urban ghettoes towards the small-town and rural spaces of Poland, which had been relatively neglected in Polish histories (and cultural representations) of WWII.21 A lack of documentation, alongside a class-based dismissal of non-urban experiences as marginal and insignificant, is sometimes thought to underlie this neglect (Janicka 2018, 65). Grabowski and Engelking have traced the experiences of Jewish Poles trying to hide in the countryside and in small towns, arguing that they were often dangerous spaces due to their lack of anonymity (see Grabowski 2013; Engelking 2011; Engelking and Grabowski 2018). Poles often feared their own neighbours; helping a Jewish person contravened the interests of non-Jewish communities, and helpers were sometimes robbed and beaten by their neighbours after the war (Tokarska-Bakir 2019, 94, 89–91). Scholars have suggested that Polish responsibility for Jewish deaths in the Holocaust is more extensive than has previously been supposed, pointing not only to the scale of denunciations of Jewish people in hiding, but also to incidents in which Poles organised or took part in acts of perpetration, including ‘hunts’ for Jewish people (Grabowski 2013), individual murders, and pogroms such as those that spread throughout Eastern Poland in 1941.22 Court documents and memoirs describe brutal killings with farm implements.23 Before 2000, acts of Polish violence during the Holocaust were generally attributed to a criminal fringe of society. However, more recent analyses suggest that violence was also carried out by respected members of the community with positions in local administration, ‘ordinary’ Catholic men with families and jobs (Gross with Grudzińska-Gross 2012, 52; see also Tokarska-Bakir 2019, Skibińska 2011). Many of the crimes took place in broad daylight with numerous onlookers. In the provincial crimes they studied, Skibińska and Petelewicz describe ‘an aggressive, criminal crowd, where a few people play an initiating and leading role’, while those who watched provide a ‘“moral” alibi’. ‘In a certain sense’, they continue, ‘the entire village takes part in the crime’ (cited in Gross with Grudzińska-Gross 2012, 53). Passed down in the memory of the village or town for generations after the war, the crimes

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became an ‘open secret’ amongst the residents who often profited from them (Tokarska-Bakir 2014). Researchers have described the material benefits that accrued to Poles during and after the Holocaust, as Jewish-­ owned homes, land, and businesses were appropriated (sometimes by people who had lost their own homes) in a process so transformative that it created, according to Leder (2014), an entirely new Polish middle class. The figure of the innocent, distanced Polish witness to Jewish suffering that dominated Polish representations of the Holocaust was shaped even before the war had ended in 1945 (Hopfinger 2018, 22).24 In the 1990s, discourses of trauma were imported from Western scholarship and, according to Janicka, artificially grafted onto the witness figure to create a new image of a traumatised Polish witness to the Holocaust (2018, 2).25 New research has sought to deconstruct this, and also to reframe Polish bystanding, interrogating the assumption that Polish bystanders were, at worst, indifferent to Jewish suffering.26 Scholars have argued that anti-Semitism was inherent in the structure of society, rather than only identifiable in individuals (Janicka 2018, 166). Given the ‘brutal context’ of the war and German occupation, to speak of a passive and indifferent bystander is an ‘impossible proposition’ (Grabowski 2019, 201). Even to do nothing in the face of violence is to take a particular stance.27 Grabowski has argued that most people, however, did not ‘do nothing’, as the Polish population tended to have a vested interest in Jewish ‘absence’, leading to a ‘massive assault on Jewish legal and property rights’ (2019, 192).28 Research has suggested that the lines dividing a perpetrator from a bystander, or even from a rescuer, could be fluid, depending on the situational dynamics of each episode of crisis or killing (Gross 2003, 12. See also Hopfinger 2018, 10; Engelking 2011, 257; Wierzcholska 2016, 2).29 Many challenges have been made to the arguments raised above. In particular, scholars and other commentators argue that large numbers of Jewish people collaborated with the Soviet security services, and were thus complicit in Polish wartime and post-war suffering. Critics have termed this the ‘golden mean’ principle, in which some Polish responsibility is acknowledged only if Jewish complicity is conferred (Forecki and Zawadzka 2017, 328; Żukowski 2017, 310). In a pronounced backlash to the histories presented by the ‘New Polish School’, academics have been threatened, censored and sued.30 Particularly after 2015, when the national-conservative Law and Justice party acceded to power, many research institutes have faced a ‘regimentation of topics to be researched and conclusions to be reached’ (Grudzińska-Gross 2019, 14–15).

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Histories critically investigating Polish violence and material benefits from the Holocaust have been branded part of a ‘pedagogy of shame’ and contrary to the official ‘pedagogy of national pride’.31 The latter continues to glorify Polish actions and remains invested in martyrological narratives involving rescue (Janicka 2018, 85; Żbikowski 2018, 409).

‘The Function of Jewish Absence’: Visual Cultures After Jedwabne Alongside the new scholarly engagements with Jewish history, the past two decades have seen a flourishing of interest in Jewish identity in the cultural sphere.32 A number of high-profile projects have been launched to commemorate Poland’s Jewish past, epitomised in the opening of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2013.33 The term ‘Jewish Renaissance’ has sometimes been used to describe both the resurgence of Jewish communities in contemporary Poland and the increasing engagement with Jewish culture and history amongst non-Jewish Poles. This engagement is taking place across a number of platforms.34 Many cities and towns have launched Jewish festivals and exhibitions, while communities restore synagogues and clean up Jewish cemeteries.35 Films and photography projects remediate archival footage of pre-war Jewish communities.36 Some projects are enacted at grassroots level, while others have institutional backing, such as the choice of Israeli-Polish artist Yael Bartana to represent Poland at the 2011 Venice Biennale with a series of films imagining the return of Jewish people to Poland.37 This cultural work forms an important context for films such as Aftermath, Ida and It Looks Pretty. Although a range of people with diverse motivations are involved in these projects, one can point to recurring ways in which Jewish ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ is constructed. For example, the Jewish past is often configured as a kind of haunting. Texts, plays and films feature Jewish zombies crawling out of the former Warsaw ghetto, the spectres of pogrom victims haunting perpetrators, or dybbuks possessing human bodies.38 Scholars have discussed Polish culture’s framing of spectral Jewish returns as expressing ‘anxiety’ about the Jewish past (Waligórska 2014, 210), symptomatic of blocked memory and unmourned loss (Borowicz 2015, 134) or characteristic of ‘post-memory’ built out of the spectral fragments and traces of history (Karolak 2013, 124). Stories of the Jewish undead, with

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their potential for thematising and enacting a performative mourning or exorcism, perhaps best crystallise the ways in which Jewish ‘absence’ often comes to have a particular ‘function’ for Polish society: to heal and absolve the Polish nation (Underhill 2011, 583). A number of scholars have criticised the ways in which the language of catharsis and healing has been instrumentalised in some of the projects of the ‘Jewish Renaissance’. Janicka and Żukowski, for example, argue that Jewish people are often ‘phantasms’ in such works, an abstract collective co-opted to impart forgiveness to non-Jewish Poles (2016, 21, 10). Texts of haunting, furthermore, frequently draw on a long history of configuring Jewish people as supernatural or uncanny, and thus multiply ‘othered’ (Waligórska 2013, 158).39 Scholars have argued, then, that projects evoking nostalgia or enacting mourning for a lost Jewish past might be in danger of reiterating the same basic assumptions about Jewish ‘otherness’ that have been foundational to anti-Semitism (Janicka and Żukowski 2016, 14). Janicka and Żukowski have thus questioned whether Gross’s work has effected any real change in Poland’s cultural ‘collective imaginarium’ (2016, 9). Present and past structures of prejudice and exclusion are easily obscured by constructions of Jewish ‘absence’. As Dziuban has noted, such constructions were integral to the formation of the post-war Polish state as it sought to legitimise its seizure of ‘post-Jewish’ property (Dziuban 2019b, 135–136). The nostalgic emphasis on Jewish spectres and traumatic voids in cultural discourse can have the effect of further invisibilising these real and continuing material appropriations (Dziuban 2019b, 152).

Jedwabne: Unwanted Images? While recognising the problematic ways in which culture might instrumentalise Jewish ‘absence’, I want to return to discussing a different kind of absence: the dearth of archival images showing Poles during WWII engaged in acts of lethal violence against their Jewish neighbours. Amongst the documentation relating to Jedwabne, there are several brief suggestions that the pogrom was filmed or photographed by Germans.40 Such images, if they exist, have never been located. Without wishing to conflate very different situations and contexts, the absent images of Jedwabne take their (non)place amongst other undocumented or scarcely imaged acts of mass violence, including, for example, the Rwandan and Armenian genocides, and, as aforementioned, various aspects of the Holocaust.41 Saxton

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has commented on ‘the near absence of photographs or film footage of the Nazi machine of mass murder in action’, and particularly of the gas chamber (Saxton 2008, 2). These ‘missing images’, she argues, have haunted discussions on Holocaust representation, as exemplified by the debates around the pellicule maudite or ‘confounded reel’, hypothetical footage of a gas chamber which provoked much debate around the ethics of showing images of atrocity (Saxton 2008, 53).42 While it is intriguing that Jedwabne may have its own pellicule maudite of a kind, the lack of archival images of Polish violence against Jewish people has attracted little philosophical or theoretical debate. Yet, as with many other un-imaged incidents of mass killing, this lack lends another layer to the recurring discussions about representations of atrocity: how to imagine, and frame into images, something that has so rarely been visualised? How might visual culture shape itself around what has been to a large extent ‘unseen’? Even in fictionalised forms, Polish visual culture contains very few images of Poles directly inflicting violence against Jewish citizens, and the Jedwabne revelations have not substantially changed this fact. Two decades after the revelations, there have been no re-enactments of Jedwabne or other pogroms in visual culture.43 Arguably, alongside the ‘narrative shock’ of the historical revelations has come a kind of crisis of images, in which filmmakers and artists have been unable or unwilling to reconstruct acts of Polish perpetration.44 And yet, a visual iconography has steadily emerged around Polish wartime violence that challenges the parameters of what might be ‘wanted’ and ‘unwanted’ ways of framing atrocity. Artists and filmmakers engaging with Polish perpetration often thematise the challenges of imaging, imagining and framing it. In Zofia Lipecka’s installation ‘Po Jedwabnem/After Jedwabne’, for example, Wasersztajn’s testimony was read aloud while projections showed the shocked expressions of people listening to the testimony and mirrors reflected the visitor’s own face.45 What was visualised, then, was not the event but the process of coming-to-know about it, which, as I have suggested, also informs the structure of much Polish aftermath cinema. Other work comes closer to visibilising Polish wartime violence. In 2001, for example, Agnieszka Arnold released a documentary on Jedwabne which expanded into approximately two hours what the opening fragment of Cain was only able to hint at. Entitled Neighbours (Gross borrowed the title of his book from Arnold’s film with her permission), the film contains a number of revealing interviews indicating the continuation of structures of

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intimidation; some (non-Jewish) Poles, for example, express their fear of discussing the atrocities and, unwilling to appear on camera, have their faces obscured. Neighbours approaches an audiovisual imagining of the events without ever quite reconstructing them. When we hear of victims fleeing through wheat fields or across town, we see close-up images of wheat and cobble stones as though from their point of view. We hear their muffled screaming. Fast-paced editing shuffles the images together, as though signalling aborted attempts to imagine and frame these events. Neighbours gives the impression that we are watching the formation of iconic images or even clichés associated with rural violence. For Deleuze, clichés crystallise at the moment of facing something terrible; they ‘furnish us with something to say when we no longer know what to do’ (1995, 19). Clichés thus both signify and conceal a crisis (Backman Rogers 2015, 27). In Neighbours, the moments approaching ‘reconstruction’ only give us glimpses, as it were, of the corners of frames (the ground, stones and fragments of wheat), continually pointing to what is not being visualised on screen.46 In the face of the lack of archival images of Jedwabne and similar events, it is the image of a barn on fire that has emerged as the most reproduced icon of Polish perpetration (Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska 2012, 256). This image is powerfully associated with promotional material for Gross’s Neighbours, reproduced on its covers and in the Polish media.47 In 2010, artist Rafał Betlejewski, belatedly responding to the ‘shock’ of reading Gross’s Neighbours, furthered this visual iconography by burning down a barn in an Eastern Polish town (depicted in his short film Płonie Stodoła/Burning Barn, 2010, Poland).48 The town’s residents were encouraged to treat the event as a kind of picnic, gathering to watch the spectacle in a way that ‘unknowingly repeated actions […] from the times of the Holocaust’ (Janicka and Żukowski 2016, 148–149). These residents, on the whole, wanted to see the barn burning, while many other people did not; the event gained widespread criticism for trivialising the Holocaust. Examining some of these responses, Zubrzycki wonders whether Betlejewski’s performance was ‘too close to the real thing’, and concludes that ‘perhaps Jedwabne is still too close to be “experienced”’ (2013, 109–110). Collectively, these works of visual culture encourage us to question: what exactly might be an ‘unwanted’ image of Polish perpetration, and for whom?

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Polish Aftermath Cinema Holocaust film in Poland has always been ‘determined by social taboos and political correctness’ (Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska 2012, 321). Films treating the Holocaust have rarely strayed far from ‘acceptable’ narratives focusing on the difficulties and dangers for Poles assisting Jewish people and ‘sacrificing themselves for their Jewish neighbours’ (Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska 2012, 322, 37). Such films continue to be made in (and outside) Poland, but there is an emerging cinema that engages differently with histories of Polish violence against Jewish Poles, which is exemplified by the four films under discussion in this book.49 This is not to say that they uniformly present radical counter-histories; the films mobilise their own evasions and erasures. Before I outline the precise ways in which they will be examined here, it will be useful to briefly introduce and summarise each film. Birthplace (1992), the first feature-length film by Polish-Jewish documentary filmmaker Paweł Łoziński, preceded the Jedwabne revelations, but has come to resonate in new ways in the post-Jedwabne climate. The film has provided a template for exploring violence and greed in rural communities during the Holocaust and the ‘non-sites of memory’ where Jewish victims are still buried. The documentary follows the return of Polish-Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg (who was living in America) to the region of rural Poland where he was born. He locates a number of places where he and his family struggled to survive during the Holocaust, and interviews his former gentile neighbours as he attempts to discover what happened to his family. He learns that his father Abram was murdered by his Polish neighbours. Towards the end of the film, a group of villagers lead Grynberg and the camera crew to a field where Abram’s body had been dumped; his skeletal remains are unearthed. Birthplace garnered some critical acclaim but attracted little public notice upon its release. By contrast, the film billed as the first fiction film ‘about’ Jedwabne, made by the well-known Polish genre director Władysław Pasikowski, attracted a great deal of controversy. Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012) never refers directly to Jedwabne, though it invents a similar atrocity, which takes place decades before the film’s action begins. The film opens as Franek Kalina returns to the rural Polish town of his birth, after word reaches him that his brother, Józef, has been ostracised from the community. In his field, Józef has planted old Jewish gravestones that he has collected from around the town; these, under German occupation and after, had been used to pave roads and walkways. Franek

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discovers that the land they inherited from their father was taken from the Jewish residents following their deaths during the war; indeed, much of the current farmland used to be Jewish-owned property. Amidst eruptions of violence, the brothers dig in the foundations of their father’s old house, and discover the bones of massacred Jewish villagers. Two encounters with elderly residents confirm that the Poles killed their Jewish neighbours by burning them alive in the house, and that the Kalinas’ own father was the main perpetrator. Pasikowski has stated that his response to reading Gross’s Neighbours, a text for which he was ‘not prepared’, was to ‘almost immediately’ begin writing the screenplay for Aftermath (Sadowska 2012a). Although Aftermath’s script was, according to producer Dariusz Jabłoński, ready by 2005 (Nowicka 2015, 190), Pasikowski had difficulties in funding the film, which he perceived as an act of political censorship (Sadowska 2012a). The film was eventually backed by a number of private investors and European funding bodies. Unsurprisingly, given the way it dismantles traditional Polish narratives about the Holocaust, the film sparked a violent debate in the media and was attacked for being ‘anti-Polish’. Many of these discussions recycled nationalist arguments concerning Poland’s self-­ image from previous debates on Gross’s work (Nowicka 2015, 203). Indeed, Pasikowski was frequently paralleled with Gross, whose name has, in certain circles, become synonymous with anti-Polishness (Forecki 2013b, 222). Aftermath was attacked as much for what it ‘left out’ about WWII as for what it included: there are no Poles attempting to assist Jewish people, no Germans at all, and no suggestion of Jewish collaboration with the Soviets. A number of scholars researching new histories of Polish violence during the Holocaust praised this unequivocal approach (see, for example, Tokarska-Bakir 2012; Janicka 2018; Żukowski 2017, 2018a). Aftermath’s proved to be a very different vision from Pawlikowski’s Ida  (2013), a black-and-white art film released the following year. Pawlikowski, a Polish-­ born transnational director, references Polish perpetration and material benefits from Jewish murders in a more oblique way. Ida opens in the early 1960s in Poland, as a Catholic novice and orphan named Anna is ordered by her Mother Superior to see her only living relative before taking her vows. This turns out to be her aunt Wanda, a former Stalinist prosecutor. Wanda tells Anna that her family was Jewish, and that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. The two women return to their old village, and find a Catholic family living in their former house. The current resident

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promises to reveal the location of the family graves if they give up their claim to the property. He takes them to a ‘non-site’ in the forest, where he digs up the remains of their family, and then confesses to killing them. Ida was generally well-received by critics abroad and won a number of awards.50 It was also awarded within Poland, but the film was extremely divisive amongst critics across the political spectrum.51 It was accused of recycling anti-Semitic stereotypes around ‘żydokomuna’ through the character of Wanda, and of attempting to escape from politics and history altogether into the ‘subtle’ and ambiguous aesthetics of art cinema (Graff 2013). Others derided the film for being anti-Polish and promoting a poor image of Poland abroad.52 In interviews, Pawlikowski defended his film by stating that ‘Ida doesn’t set out to explain history […] I wanted to make the film very specific and very concrete, and at the same time universal and poetic’ (Child 2015). It Looks Pretty From A Distance (2011), a feature-length film by artists and filmmakers Anka (or Anna) Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal, was released before Aftermath and Ida, and in several ways departs from the pattern set by Birthplace: there are no investigations or exhumations. Because it is an outlier in this respect, the film will be discussed last. It Looks Pretty takes place in a small Polish village around the present day, and focuses initially on a scrap-collector, Paweł. When Paweł disappears, his neighbours strip his home of anything of value, and burn the remainder in a bonfire. When Paweł unexpectedly reappears, his girlfriend stabs him and leaves him for dead. It Looks Pretty can hardly be said to deal explicitly with the Holocaust or Polish-Jewish relations. As critics have noted, the word ‘Jewish’ is never even spoken in the film (Majmurek 2015, 103; Kurz 2012). Yet in interviews, the Sasnals have explicitly positioned their film alongside post-­ millennial historical and sociological work on the behaviour of Polish villagers during and after the war, citing particularly the writing of Gross and Engelking (see Ruszczyk 2012). It Looks Pretty was the first of the Sasnals’ films to move into regular theatrical distribution, but its limited reach and audience meant that it generated, in comparison with Aftermath and Ida, little controversy or debate.

Coming-to-Know Each of the films described above has been received by viewing publics as a contribution to the historical discussion about Polish acts of perpetration and bystanding. Indeed, Hopfinger has suggested that, in Poland, it is

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films that first and foremost provoke controversy and debate in the public sphere (2018, 49). As Żukowski (2017, 296) has pointed out, both fiction and non-fiction Polish history films are often discussed in relation to a perceived notion of historical ‘truth’.53 As briefly indicated above, the creators of the three ‘post-Jedwabne’ films have in interviews variously explained their relationship to historical events or works of scholarship. The analyses in this book proceed with the understanding that the films have clearly been impacted by the post-Jedwabne climate: they have emerged from it, engaged with it, and speak back to it. This book will not, however, engage in depth with issues of historical accuracy. To appropriate Gross’s words (2003, 11), this book stands somewhat askew of the fields of scholarship at the conjunction of film and history or film and memory. Instead, I am interested in how ‘coming-to-know’ about Jedwabne and Polish violence has been configured as a process or a structure in a way that resonates across historical scholarship, public discussion, and works of culture. I use this as a springboard to delve into the formal, aesthetic and narrative details of the films under discussion. Chapter 2 will examine more closely the ways in which the knowledge about Jedwabne is formulated as a ‘shock’ of finally seeing something in Poland’s history that doesn’t fit into this past as traditionally conceived. I will draw these expressions into dialogue with the structure and language of anamorphosis, which places emphasis on looking anew, or awry, at a previously accepted way of framing reality. The shock of knowledge might then open the possibility (or, indeed, the necessity) of changing the frame of history while also re-framing our understanding of contemporary behaviours and attitudes.54 Thinking through anamorphosis as a process of reframing also helps to bind together questions of visibility, aesthetics and film form (cinematic framing), with an understanding of ‘framing’ as epistemological and ideological. To reiterate, none of the films analysed here attempt to reconstruct the moment in which a Polish citizen murders their Polish-Jewish neighbour. Instead, each film, to a greater or lesser extent, puts into operation processes of coming-to-know these events, events that happened in the films’ diegetic pasts and are in each case foundational moments that propel the narratives in the present. I will trace the ways in which the ‘narrative shock’ of Jedwabne, the disruption of this knowledge to conventional framings of history, the disputes over interpretation, and the attempts to make meaning from these events, are refracted through post-Jedwabne films, which themselves thematise and enact the epistemological shocks heralded by a

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corrosive, unwanted knowledge. The films revolve around questions of how to live in the time ‘after such knowledge’, with the realisation that some were always ‘before’ such knowledge (those who always knew), and that not everyone is ‘after’ it (those who refuse to ‘know’). While staging the struggle of characters to live in the aftermaths of violence, the films also suggest the continued mechanisms of power, exclusion and othering that are a real material link between the wartime past and the films’ presents. In the absence of the original people involved in wartime and Holocaust atrocity, new figures come to occupy ritual positions of ‘self’ and ‘other’. One example of this is how, in the absence of Jewish characters in Aftermath and It Looks Pretty, gentile Poles come to stand in for absent Jewish Poles, forced into these positions by the dominant majority through a series of displacements and substitutions, so that they are subject to anti-Semitic abuse and violence as though they were Jewish.55 Setting into motion particular kinds of investigative processes, the films also draw viewers into processes of coming-to-know, inscribing moments of shock or revelation, and enacting struggles to comprehend and make meaning. They mobilise our desire to interpret and understand through allegory, symbolism, intertextuality, genre patterns and narrative modes. But they also bring us up against points where interpretation is uncertain, meaning seems unclear, and knowledge is undermined. This book will argue that a spectrum of meaning and knowing is put into place across the films not just for the characters and their investigations into the past, but also as a process and experience for filmic spectators. It is the nature and possibility of meaning and knowledge itself that forms a recurrent thread in these films, both thematically and formally. They not only thematise the difficulties of coming-to-know but also put into motion similar processes across their narratives and formal structures that we, as viewers, become entangled with.

‘An Ocean of Variables’: Close Reading This book approaches its four filmic case studies as sites, or passages of time, replete with innumerable interpretive possibilities, paradoxes and conflicts. At the very least, this is indicated by the irreconcilable interpretations that circulate around the films, as the same cinematic work has been read as contributing to completely opposed political stances. As bell hooks reminds us, ‘a film may have incredibly revolutionary standpoints merged with conservative ones’, which makes it difficult to ‘critically “read” the

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overall filmic narrative’ (2009, 3). I agree with Klevan that it is through a close reading that the ‘particular configurations of all the elements that meet in the work’ can be teased out, though my analyses are necessarily limited by space and I certainly cannot cover ‘all’ their elements (2018, 86). While I fold historical and historiographical work into the close readings in this book, I have been led by a film-theoretical and film-­philosophical approach, with a particular attention to film form. The affective and conceptual possibilities of film form must be, as Brinkema noted, ‘read for’ in a way that is sensitive to ‘points of contradiction’, to ‘form’s waning and absence’, and to ‘formlessness’ (2014, 37). The practice of close reading that I take up in this book resonates with the films’ thematic concerns, as they stage diegetic attempts to read archives, landscapes, and human remains, make meaning from memories, confessions, and distortions, in climates of erasure, censorship and silencing. Concomitantly, cinematic images, moments, sequences, frames, and material formations seem to address viewers from within the film, encouraging us to formulate our own practices of ‘reading’ them. Films are never fully ‘readable’, however. For every symbol, icon and allegorical moment, cinema presents us with deferrals of knowledge, formal ellipses and material obstructions to understanding. Rather than easily pressing themselves into the service of meaning, filmic images may resonate with uncertainty as the operation of temporality puts meaning into flux.56 As Beugnet has argued, film is in fundamental ways ‘ill-suited to the expression of the fixed, complete and clear-cut’ (2017, 7). ‘Each frame’, she continues, ‘contains an ocean of variables’ (2017, 10). One of the benefits of close reading as a practice is that it can follow some of these unfoldings through time. In his critique of art history, Didi-Huberman has noted how frequently details from artworks are used as a key to interpret the work as a whole (2005, 230). I find, conversely, that it is often details, moments or particular formal arrangements that displace the neat interpretive frameworks that one attempts to cast over them. Particular images might compel a shifting of the frame, as though the image were a point of anamorphosis, looking back at us and confounding attempts to wrangle it into coherence. This book has attempted to be open to what Davis has described as a ‘hermeneutics of overreading’ (2010, 178), which welcomes the prospect of ‘encountering something raw, unanticipated and incongruous in a text or film, without the need to coerce it into a pre-existing, coherent unity of meaning’ (Davis 2010, 178). Davis discovers these strategies of

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‘overreading’ in the work of a number of theorists, including some— Derrida, Deleuze and Levinas—that I draw on in this book. Despite their different ways of approaching meaning, he argues, they all embrace the ‘threat’ of ‘overinterpretation’ through their close readings of texts. In setting up the theoretical frameworks for my close analyses in this book, I have also been inspired to read across the work of a number of theorists, locating points of resonance in the formulation of ideas, despite divergences in their philosophical and theoretical underpinnings. In Chap. 2, I will briefly trace the ways in which some of the theoretical frameworks negotiate questions of knowledge, how they consider textual, cinematic or artistic polysemy, and how they formulate the limits or thresholds of meaning. Despite certain resonances, the frameworks are inevitably also disjunctive, yet I proceed with the belief that to pay attention to the fluctuation of a film in its unfolding necessitates a fluid approach to theory and philosophy. The work of Levinas and Deleuze informs my approach to Birthplace in Chap. 3, ‘Posthumous landscapes and the earth-archive: archaeology, ethics and Birthplace’. I draw on the Deleuzian notion of stratigraphic images to consider how Grynberg’s return to his birthplace is layered with spoken recollections and narratives, creating distinct though interrelated strata that the film sifts through. The film’s actual process of excavating human remains materialises this archaeological metaphor. For Laura Marks, the act of archaeology involves ‘combining elements from different strata in order to resist the order that would be imposed by working on one stratum alone […] knowing that the result will be contradictory and partial’ (2000, 28). This way of working with different layers has informed both the analysis of Birthplace and the chapter’s theoretical framework. The chapter layers together elements of Deleuzian thought with Levinasian philosophy, knowing indeed that the result is ‘contradictory and partial’. Levinas’s writing on our ethical obligation to the other, emanating from the face or visage, has great resonance for how Birthplace evokes and performs multiple encounters between human subjects within the film, and between the film and the viewer. Chapter 4, ‘Aftermath’s cinematic séance: anamorphosis, spectrality and sentient matter’, traces the play and process of visuality suggested by anamorphosis. I argue that this structure can productively be thought together with Derrida’s writing on spectrality. In the discourses of ‘hauntology’ that have emerged from Derrida’s writing, the spectral is something that looks at and addresses us, before and beyond our

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awareness of this look. Anamorphosis and the asymmetrical structure of spectral looking enable the identification of a network of images and objects that provoke both characters and (potentially) viewers to reframe their visions of the present and the past. My understanding of spectrality, and the cinematic ‘séance’ that Aftermath evokes, is not, however, predicated on the supernatural, but rather one that recognises what Dziuban has called the ‘unacknowledged continuities’ between past and present cycles of violence (2019b, 133). The way in which Aftermath exposes such continuities can be contrasted with Ida, which instead focuses heavily on what has been lost, as I will argue in Chap. 5, ‘The fabric with its rend: framing grief, materialising loss and Ida’s temporalities’. The film creates a network of images that do not so much ‘look back’ at characters and viewers, but rather continually suggest an ‘absence at the heart’ of the image, as though something crucial has vacated the frame.57 Drawing on the work of Brinkema, the chapter argues that an aesthetic of grief is mobilised across the film, in tandem with its diegetic exploration of loss. Chapter 5 will draw on Didi-­ Huberman’s confrontations with art images in their intertwined evocations of ‘knowledge’ with ‘not-knowledge’, and ‘the fabric of representation’ ‘with its rend’ (2005, 144). Ida, I argue, presents us with ‘the fabric’ of symbolisation, meaning and knowledge, alongside the ‘rends’ of loss, absence and grief. Bergson’s philosophy of temporality as continual flux and change provides a fruitful point of intersection with Didi-Huberman, informing the ways in which these dualities blend and blur through duration. The book’s final chapter, ‘A film found on a scrapheap: abjection, informe and It Looks Pretty From A Distance’, argues that the village in the Sasnals’ film functions as a scrapyard of unwanted knowledge, people, objects and images. The chapter has taken shape (or, perhaps, lost shape) by conjoining scraps of theory emanating from four different origins. I consider the film via allegory (in which the violence against the non-­Jewish Paweł and the looting of his property references Jewish experiences of the Holocaust), abjection (drawing on Kristeva’s writing to consider expulsion and rejection as a failed structure) and formlessness (as initially outlined by Bataille and then taken up in art history to describe a corrosive pulsation in the image). Thrown in, too, is David Trotter’s theorisation of mess and waste. The chapter draws out some alignments in this theoretical jumble: all these frameworks are concerned with the point at which we are brought up against the limits of our ability to make meaning and impose

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coherence. This process, I argue, is as much thematised in the film as enacted formally, as symbolic and meaningful framings lose their contours and outlines.

Framing the Material: Composition and Decomposition John Mullarkey has written that ‘it is the messiness of film, its resistance to singular theory, that makes it theoretically interesting’  (2009, 11). He valorises the benefits of creating a multi-theoretical approach to cinema, where the range of theories ‘refract each other simply by their being co-­ presented’ (2009, 207). Where Mullarkey thinks of this as a montage, I consider a series of overlapping frames that shift and change with the fluctuations of the object(s). As Bal writes, framing, thought of as an activity with a temporal dimension, impacts upon how we might think about knowledge as similarly fluid. ‘An important consequence of framing having its roots in time is the unstable position of knowledge itself’, she asserts (2002, 136). While this ‘might seem to lead to an epistemic aporia’, as knowledge loses its fixed grounding, Bal considers instead that instability can produce ‘a different kind of grounding’, where an object is ‘put under pressure; its meaning is multiplied; its material existence set up as troubled’ (2002, 136). Chapter 2 will set up some of the frames through which I put pressure on and trouble the existence of the four films analysed in this book. Framing itself, as part of the structure of anamorphosis, opens the discussion, before I consider the ways in which matter and materialities are framed within the theoretical spectrum of meaning and knowing. In the films examined here, the material and the discursive are ‘mutually implicated’ (Barad 2008, 140), not least through the consistent blurring of the literal and the metaphorical. For example, ‘homes’ are physically ruined or impossible to return to, while signalling a figurative ruination of the symbolic valence of ‘home’ (Żukowski 2017, 343). In excavations of landscapes and exhumations of bones, the archaeological metaphor frequently used to discuss filmic layerings of past and present is made literal. Human remains seem to have a privileged position within these ‘cinematic habitats’, a term used by Pick and Narraway to describe entanglements between human characters and viewers, film form, and the natural environment (2013, 4). Exhumed bones speak powerfully to a need to make matter signify. The remains of Jewish victims of Polish murders are

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a constant presence in the films, even if not always made available to vision or knowledge. They often feature in the mutual articulation of the material and discursive. Pasikowski, for example, speaks of the history of Polish perpetration as a ‘skeleton in the closet’, while in his film it is skeletonised remains that quite literally lie at the foundations of the ancestral home. Aptly, it is as a skull that the anamorphic stain of The Ambassadors resolves itself and casts a shadow of death over its own representations of knowledge and power. Posthumous organic matter seems to slide continuously between what Trotter has identified as ‘illusion-sustaining’ and ‘illusion-­ destroying’ materiality, bringing us face-to-face (literally and figuratively) with decay and mortality (2010, 165). In posthuman approaches to post-genocide sites, however, human remains are afforded a transformative agency, as organic human matter enters into active relationships with soil and plant life. Drawing on this scholarship, Chap. 2 will delineate what I call a ‘posthumous ecology’, a term I use to describe the complex networks extending between human remains, the landscapes in which they have been dumped, the local residents who ‘read’ these spaces, and the people who return to them. I trace filmic attempts to narrativise the excavated bones of Jewish victims, to make them fit back into particular frameworks of meaning and value through the recollections, confessions and prayers that emerge alongside the exhumations. As Brinkema has suggested, rotting and decomposition is ‘a problem for the form of the thing’ (2014, 171); in posthumous transformations, the body loses its familiar ‘human’ form. How, then, might cinematic composition respond to these dissipations? In this book, I will identify how film attempts to ‘recompose’ itself in the face of death’s disturbance, which often takes the form of reconceptualising remains as readable artefacts emerging from an earth-archive. I will argue, however, that the emergence of human remains from the ground might also signal an abject evacuation of meaning and force confrontations with erasures and ellipses, for both the human figures in the films and the thematic and aesthetic framings of the films. Such moments crystallise what is a wider trajectory in Polish aftermath cinema. At the points at which something becomes visible, a memory becomes audible, remains are uncovered, or the place of one’s birth is seen, silences, evasions, and repressions are already configuring film form and narrative. Continuing structures of power and exclusion shape these gaps and uncertainties, compelling filmmakers and film audiences to ask: how do we frame the unwanted knowledge of Polish perpetration and exist in its aftermaths?

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Notes 1. Terms used to describe non-Jewish Poles and Jewish Poles are laden with different assumptions and histories, and have been the subject of much debate (see, e.g., Polonsky and Michlic 2004, 41–42; Krajewski 2005, 17–18). Some commentators refer to the ‘Polish’ and ‘Jewish’ people of Poland as though they were two distinct groups, which elides the fact that Jewish people in Poland were also Polish citizens, a national minority of approximately 10% before the war, and a group that was consistently ‘othered’ by non-Jewish Poles. Keeping this in mind, I will use a number of different terms to describe Jewish Poles and non-Jewish Poles in this book. 2. Although this is not stipulated in the film, recorded testimonies suggest that this incident took place in the weeks leading up to the Jedwabne massacre, in late June 1941 (Gross 2003, 17). 3. Wasersztajn’s testimony is one of a number of accounts from people who were, or who claim to have been, present in Jedwabne that day. As is clear from Cain, there are conflicting understandings of how the violence unfolded. 4. In using the term ‘unwanted knowledge’ I am drawing on Żukowski’s description of the awareness of Polish wartime violence against Jewish people; this knowledge, he argues, had been present in certain cultural and historical works from as early as the 1940s, but was consistently ignored, disbelieved, and ‘whitewashed’ (2018a, 7–12). I will return to his argument in Chap. 2. I am also making reference to the term ‘unwanted debate’ used by Magdalena Nowicka-Franczak (2017) to describe the discussions provoked by Gross’s work on Jedwabne and Polish anti-Semitism in Neighbours and his further works Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (2006) and Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (the latter with Irena Grudzińska-Gross 2012). 5. The words ‘after Jedwabne’ might be reminiscent of the phrase ‘after Auschwitz’, a loaded term with a complex position within theoretical and historical debates about the Holocaust, and one that has often been criticized for conflating the experience of the Holocaust with the operation of one concentration camp (see, e.g., Seymour 2000, 137–138; Snyder 2010, vii–xiv). In using the word ‘Jedwabne’ as a shorthand we should continue to be mindful of other incidents of violence that occurred in other places and times in different ways, and also of the variations in Polish–Jewish relationships during the Holocaust. 6. For an account of the landscape of film production in the Polish film industry during this time, see Haltof (2019, particularly 371–419). Other films interrogating Polish wartime violence against Jewish people were of course made before this time, and have been made since. See, for example, Haltof

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(2012), Łysak (2016), Mąka-Malatyńska (2012), Pakier (2013) and Preizner (2008, 2012). These works of scholarship trace themes, characterisations, genre elements, and production and reception issues in a wide variety of films representing Holocaust experiences. My focus in this book, on Polish perpetration in rural and small-town spaces, is narrower. The kind of close reading that this book undertakes necessarily limits the number of films that can be discussed here. 7. There are, however, a number of images of the aftermath of the post-war pogrom in Kielce in 1946, during which 42 Jewish people were killed and 40 wounded. 8. These four images were taken covertly by a member of the Sonderkommando; they show naked women being herded towards the gas chamber and piles of bodies being burned. The photographs were displayed in Paris as part of the Mémoire des camps exhibition in 2001, and decried by Claude Lanzmann, amongst others, as fetishistic and voyeuristic. See Walden (2019, 25). Notably, while Didi-Huberman objects to the way in which the unimaginable is evoked ‘as dogma’, he does not reject the ‘unimaginable as experience’ (2008, 63). Knowing and imagining have their limits and ‘images never give all there is to see’ (2008, 124). 9. He makes this argument specifically in relation to Jean-Luc Godard’s montage in Histoires du Cinema (1989) (2008, 139–140). 10. The participation of Germans in the Jedwabne atrocity and the role of antiCommunist sentiment in triggering the massacre are two issues that scholars continue to disagree upon. Chodakiewicz (2012), for example, argues that the Germans organised and led the killings (see, e.g., pp. 237–238), while in Neighbours Gross suggests that the involvement of Germans was minimal, and contests the theory that the attack against Jewish Poles in Jedwabne was related primarily to anti-Communist revenge (2003). 11. In Archive Fever, Derrida argues that the ‘truth’ that is produced through the archive is a political construction, and, conversely, ‘there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory’ (1995, 11). 12. A few town residents, including the owner of the barn Bronisław Śleszyński, claimed that the building had been forcefully requisitioned by Germans (see Chodakiewicz 193–194, n. 31). Wasersztajn, on the other hand, indicates that Śleszyński gave the barn willingly, when prompted by his Polish neighbours (Gross 2003, 18–19). 13. For Joshua Hirsch, film’s confrontation with the Holocaust is inextricably linked to witnessing (2004, 6). See also Haggith and Newman (2005), especially the section titled ‘Film as Witness’. For an expanded discussion of screen media and/as witnessing, see Torchin (2012). I will return to the question of witnessing in Chap. 2.

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14. Anette Insdorf (2003, 300) has called such films ‘documentaries of return’, though there are also numerous fiction films that work with this trope. 15. Bikont details her investigation in The Crime and the Silence (2015). The latter part of this citation can be found in Janicka (2018, 52). 16. I refer to Zylinska’s translation from the Polish version of Neighbours (2005, 108). 17. I borrow the term ‘after such knowledge’ from Eva Hoffman’s 2005 book of the same name, who in turn borrows it from a line in T.S.  Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’, marked as it is by ‘anti-Semitic overtones’ (2005, xv). Hoffman was present at the Jedwabne memorial service in 2001: ‘what is the appropriate emotion’, she asked herself then, ‘for those of us who came after?’ (2005, 222). 18. Zubrzycki (2013, 98–99) considers Jedwabne as the second shock to the martyrological narrative of Poland’s wartime suffering. The first followed the fall of state socialism in 1989 and the subsequent confrontation with facts about Jewish victimhood heretofore not discussed, including the realisation that Auschwitz, long a symbol of Polish suffering under German occupation, was primarily a site of Jewish death. 19. In 2002, the Institute of National Remembrance released the findings from its investigation and partial exhumation of the site, confirming that Jewish people were burned in the barn in Jedwabne, that the massacres were carried out by at least forty Polish men, and that there were at least 350 victims. The precise number of victims could not be ascertained as the exhumations were halted following objections from Jewish  religious groups. Gross (2003) had initially suggested that there were around 1600 victims. The investigation also confirmed that similar events had occurred in a number of other towns and villages in the region. See Machcewicz and Persak (2002). For extensive analyses of the various developments surrounding the Jedwabne debates, see, e.g., Polonsky and Michlic (2004), Michlic (2012), Forecki (2013a), and Nowicka-Franczak (2017). 20. The ‘New Polish School of Holocaust Scholarship’ was the title of a conference organised around this new research that took place in Paris in February 2019. The establishment of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences has been crucial in bringing together this new scholarship (Janicka and Żukowski 2016, 8). 21. One can trace a similar shift outside of the Polish context. See, for example, the work on rural Holocaust topographies by Tim Cole (2016), and the focus on decentred sites of mass killing conducted by Nazi German SS death squads (Einsatzgruppen) across Eastern Europe in the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ (Desbois 2008). See Vice (2019) on cinematic engagements with the latter.

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22. Snyder notes that the pogroms did not just occur in Poland, but in ‘an arc that extended southward from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea’ (2010, 195). These were generally areas that had been occupied by Soviet forces, and where they had organised deportations and killings. Snyder argues that the waves of violence against Jewish people carried out by local populations at the end of June and beginning of July 1941 (which in many regions roughly coincided with the withdrawal of Soviet troops after the German invasion of the USSR) were undertaken in revenge for perceived Jewish collaboration with the Soviets (2010, 194–196). As aforementioned, the actual extent of this collaboration is a matter of dispute amongst historians. In her analysis of archival material relating to murders of Jewish people by Poles in the Sandomierz area, Tokarska-Bakir has concluded that ‘revenge’ for Soviet collaboration was an excuse that the murderers used to justify violence and looting (2019, 176). Gross has also disputed the revenge hypothesis (2003). 23. See, for example, the analysis by Skibińska (2011) of several dozen court trials in the Kielce area during the late 1940s and 1950s, which were rather half-heartedly pursued and in which most of the Polish perpetrators of violence against Jewish people were lightly punished, if at all. See also Tokarska-­Bakir (2019). 24. This way of thinking about the Polish witness was bolstered after the publication of Raul Hilberg’s Holocaust history dividing people into perpetrators, victims, and a third group of local residents in proximity to the violence, sometimes translated as ‘bystanders’ (1992). In Poland, however, this third category was translated as ‘witness’ (świadek), which gave honorific, legal and even religious overtones to this position (Tokarska-Bakir 2014). The figure of the ‘innocent witness’ had been challenged at various points before 2000. For example, extensive debates were sparked by Lanzmann’s depiction of anti-Semitic Polish villagers in Shoah  (1985); scholars have suggested, however, that rather than lead to greater selfreflection, the film was seen as a (Jewish) attack on Poland’s ‘good name’ (Hopfinger 2018, 42). It didn’t help matters that only the excerpts that concerned Polish villagers were televised (in 1985), and the full version of the film could only be seen in a few cinemas. For discussion of the reception of Shoah in Poland see Forecki (2013a) and Kwieciński (2012). 25. See, for example, Steinlauf, who develops this category extensively (1997). By critiquing the figure of the traumatised Polish witness to the Holocaust, Janicka does not deny that Poles were traumatised by their wartime experiences, but rather argues that there is little evidence that they were traumatised by their witnessing of Jewish suffering and death specifically. Given the prevalence of anti-Semitism and the material benefits accruing to Poles after Jewish deaths, Janicka finds the categorisation of the traumatised

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Polish Holocaust witness to be ‘narcissistic’ and evasive (2018, 2). See also Dziuban, who sees the ‘indiscriminate transfer’ of concepts of Holocaust trauma and postmemory from their foundations in Jewish survivor testimonies to the Polish (non-Jewish) context as dehistoricising and depoliticising (2019a, 26–27). 26. The ‘at-worst-indifferent-bystander’ figure appears at numerous points in Polish culture and debate, for example, in Jan Błoński’s article ‘The poor Poles look at the ghetto’ (1987). For discussion of this article, as well as other milestones in the debates about Polish witnessing, see Hopfinger (2018), Żukowski (2018b) and Forecki (2013a). 27. See Fulbrook (2019), who cites Mary Midgley: ‘deliberate avoidance [of knowing] is a responsible act’ (20). Failure to intervene reinforces the perpetrator’s behaviour (Fulbrook 2019, 17). 28. Grabowski cites a report from July 1943 sent to London by the foreign affairs section of the Polish political underground: ‘throughout the country, the state of things is such that the return of Jews, even in much reduced numbers, to their settlements and workshops is to be absolutely ruled out. Non-Jews have filled Jews’ places in towns and townships and this is a fundamental change of a final nature. A massive return of Jews would be perceived by the population more in the light of an invasion to be thwarted—even physically—than of restitution’ (2019, 195). 29. There has not been one accepted term to replace ‘bystander’ in Polish discourse, though several scholars have suggested possibilities; Janicka, for example, suggests the term ‘active, initiated observer’, in which looking is a fundamental aspect of agency (2014/2015, 148). I will continue to use the term ‘bystander’ in this book for the sake of ease, though I limit my use of the term ‘witness’. 30. Anti-Semitic abuse was, for example, directed by protestors towards participants of the 2019 Paris conference dedicated to the work of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research. See Brent (2019) and Wagner (2019). The legal ramifications of the Jedwabne and post-Jedwabne debates have been notable. In 2006, additions were made to the penal code stating that ‘anyone publicly accusing the Polish Nation of participating in, organizing, or being responsible for Nazi or communist crimes’ is subject to up to three years imprisonment. This was nicknamed Gross’s Law, as it was widely understood to be tailored to target Gross for certain claims about Polish anti-Semitism and wartime violence in Fear (see Zubrzycki 2017, 257). In 2018, further amendments, sometimes referred to as Poland’s ‘Holocaust law’, attempted to criminalise accusations of Polish complicity in the Holocaust and the besmirching of the ‘good name’ of Poland; this has since been downgraded to a civil offense. For discussion of the libel case against Gross and the debates on Fear see Forecki (2013a, 215–248).

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31. See Czapliński’s discussion of the changing associations of ‘shame’ in the Polish context (2017a). 32. While this book is primarily concerned with post-millennial cultural work, the fall of state socialism and lifting of censorship in 1989 is also a pivotal moment in Polish cultural engagements with Jewish history and identity. See, for example, Lorenc (2015). 33. See Janicka (2016) for a critique of the museum’s exhibition and narrative strategies, which she argues play down structural anti-Semitism and Polishled violence. 34. Some of these projects are linked to the tourism industry (see Lehrer 2013, 2014), others have directly political overtones, such as the performances by ‘mnemonic activists’ who stage urban interventions (see Zubrzycki 2017, 251). See also Lehrer and Waligórska (2013). 35. This process is sometimes charted in documentaries, such as A Town Called Brzostek (Simon Target, 2014, Australia/Poland). 36. See, for example, Jolanta Dylewska’s 2008 film Po-lin: Slivers of Memory. 37. These films consisted of Mary Koszmary/Nightmares (2007), Mur i Wiez˙ a/Wall and Tower (2009), and Zamach/Assassination, also known as We Will Be Strong in Our Weakness (2011). The installation was entitled …And Europe Will be Stunned (Bartana 2007–2011). For an analysis of Bartana’s work, see Ruchel-Stockmans (2015), Mroz (2013), Lehrer and Waligórska (2013). 38. I am referring here to Igor Ostachowicz’s novel Noc Żywych Żydów/Night of the Living Jews (2012), Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s 2009 play Nasza Klasa/ Our Class, and the film Demon (Marcin Wrona, Poland/Israel, 2015), respectively. 39. Waligórska (2013, 156) explains that the trope of the ‘magical Jew’ emerged from ‘the Christian tradition that pictured the Jew, as participant in the mystery of Christ’s death, on the borderline between this world and the world of the supernatural. Thus, the rural tradition in Poland often instrumentalised the figure of the Jew as a symbolic catalyst that could facilitate the vegetative cycle of the earth and secure vital powers, fertility and good fortune’. In her anthropological study of Polish rural space Alina Cała (1995) found that ideas about the near-supernatural powers and rituals of Jewish people persisted well into the 1980s. Arguably, there are echoes of this today in the common practice of using Jewish figurines as good-luck charms (Lehrer 2014). For further writing on this trope and its resonances throughout Polish culture see Tokarska-Bakir (2004). 40. Gross (2003, 219–220) cites a couple of sources for this. Wiktor Nieławicki, survivor of the Jedwabne pogrom, claimed that one of his colleagues from an anti-Nazi guerrilla detachment saw a German documentary newsreel in Warsaw in 1941 showing Poles murdering the Jewish residents of Jedwabne. A deposition of a Jedwabne resident also stated that ‘Germans

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stood to the side and took pictures’. Note the reversal of the usual positions of Poles and Germans here: the Germans are the ‘bystanders’ to Polish perpetration. 41. See Jinks (2016) for a comparative perspective on genocide representation. 42. See Saxton for a discussion of the disagreement between Lanzmann and Godard over this hypothetical footage (2008, 54). See also Piotr Cieplak’s discussion of the pellicule maudite in relation to filmed footage of the Rwandan genocide (2017, 132–139). 43. It is possible that this will change in the next year or so. Polish film director Wojciech Smarzowski was awarded funding from the Polish Film Institute in late 2019 (after initially being rejected) to make a film that, while largely set in contemporary times, will refer to Jedwabne. At the time of writing, it is not clear whether and to what extent the Jedwabne pogrom will be visibilised or re-enacted. The film has already begun to attract attention and controversy (Anonymous 2019). 44. There are many reasons that might lie behind the choice not to re-enact these killings: political, ideological, financial, personal, and so on. I am less concerned here with the reasons for the elision than with the effects of it. 45. This work was created between 2001 and 2003, and displayed in 2008 at the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw. For Bojarska, the projections and reflections multiplied the witnesses to an event that had been ‘unseen’ (2009, see also Mroz 2013). The artwork reinforces rather than problematizes the idealised position of the witness. 46. Arnold’s images have been criticised for their nostalgia and lack of critical distance towards Soviet iconography (Żukowski 2017, 314). See also Łysak (2011, 900). 47. See Dobrosielski (2017) who traces the icon of the burning barn across Polish visual culture. 48. The film was housed on Betlejewski’s website ‘I Miss You, Jew!’, which also documents his photography and graffiti projects, in which he and his volunteers paint the slogan ‘I Miss You, Jew!’ on walls and buildings. See Lehrer and Waligórska (2013), Mroz (2013), Zubrzycki (2013), Janicka and Żukowski (2016). 49. Post-millennial films that continue to draw on narratives of Polish rescue include Historia Kowalskich (Arkadiusz Gołębiewski and Maciej Pawlicki, Poland, 2009), Joanna (Feliks Falk, Poland, 2010), In Darkness/W Ciemności (Agnieszka Holland, Poland/Germany/Canada, 2011), and The Righteous/Sprawiedliwy (Michał Szczerbic, Poland, 2015). While some of these films, such as In Darkness, trouble the idealised vision of Polish helpers, others, such as Historia Kowalskich, can be identified as part

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of the backlash against Gross and new Polish Holocaust histories. See Forecki (2012). 50. For example, Ida won the award for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards (2013) and won similar awards at a number of international film festivals, including Toronto and London (both in 2013). 51. For example, Ida won awards for the Best Film, Best Cinematography and other categories at the National Polish Film Awards in Gdynia (2013). 52. In a well-publicised campaign, the right-wing Polish Anti-Defamation League petitioned the government to insert an intertitle before the film to remind (international) viewers of the aid given by the Polish Righteous to Jewish people. 53. Blacker and Etkind suggest that this way of understanding cultural works is common in post-Socialist states that had for decades censored historical topics. Films, texts and artworks often promote their own claim to historical accuracy: ‘presenting fiction, they aim for truth, and in fact convince the public that they get closer to historical reality through reimagining it’ (2013, 7). For an example of how this occurs, see the discussion around Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyń (Poland, 2007) in Etkind et al. (2012). 54. I am inspired here by Dziuban’s discussion of the ‘politics of framing and reframing’ in relation to WWII and Holocaust memorials. Juxtaposing different spatial practices at memorial sites, she argues, allows us to look ‘awry’ at them, and change the frame of our understanding (2012, 83). 55. Zubrzycki (2006, 148) explains that, in some conservative and nationalist ways of thinking, Jewish people are the obvious enemy; anyone on their side are traitors to ‘real’ Polishness and thus, through a complex chain of associations, are considered to be ‘Jews’. Hence, she writes, ‘we witness the strange phenomenon of anti-Semitism in a country virtually without Jews’ (2006, 211). 56. This book thus builds on my previous work, Temporality and Film Analysis (Mroz 2012), which practised a mode of close analysis that was attentive to how meaning, affect and emotion develop through time. Temporality and Film Analysis drew on Henri Bergson’s writing on duration in order to think about the multiplicity of temporal rhythms unfolded through cinema. 57. I am drawing here on Wylie’s term ‘absence at the heart of the point-of-­ view’ (2009, 278).

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CHAPTER 2

Earth and Bone: Framing Posthumous Materialities

Anamorphosis I: The Blind Spot Kaja Silverman’s Lacanian analysis of Holbein’s The Ambassadors emphasises the painting’s structuring of visuality around a point of anamorphosis. She notes that the artwork offers us two modes of viewing, which correspond to two vantage points onto the painting. The conventional, perspectival image of the men and their accouterments of knowledge is associated with ‘the dominant fiction’, a hegemonic mode of representation. Silverman writes: the position in relation to which the conventional perspectival image comes into focus—the geometral point—is closely connected, historically and philosophically, to a Cartesian notion of subjectivity […] when we occupy that point, everything seems to radiate outwards from our look. (1996, 176–177)

The perspectival system of intelligibility accords with what is ‘given-to-be-­ seen’ as reality, and what suggests our mastery over what we see (1996, 178). The Ambassadors, however, undoes the dominant fiction by ‘rendering part of the image unavailable to our vision’ in the form of the stain or blur within the frame (1996, 177). It is only when viewed from the side that this blur becomes visible as a skull. The painting thus prevents us from ‘effecting an imaginary mastery of its contents by dramatizing our “blind spot”’ (1996, 177). Silverman’s use of the word ‘dramatizing’ crucially © The Author(s) 2020 M. Mroz, Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7_2

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suggests a performative aspect to this process of hiding and revealing. Anamorphosis encourages us to adopt what Silverman calls a ‘productive look’, which ‘requires a constant conscious reworking of the terms under which we unconsciously look at the objects that people our visual landscape’ (1996, 184). Productive looking necessitates a reorientation away from the dominant fiction so that we can ‘see again, differently’ (1996, 184). The point of anamorphosis indicates the pre-existence of ‘a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other’ (Lacan cited by Jay 1993, 362).1 The gaze, and anamorphosis, is part of a complex understanding of the structure of vision, desire and the libidinal economy in Lacan’s work that moves far beyond the scope of this book. My interest in anamorphosis is, rather, in how it provides a productive framework or structure through which to read the expressions of epistemological shock that have recurred in Polish engagements with the unwanted knowledge of Polish wartime violence. In Chap. 1, I drew attention to how Gross described the sensation of a veil falling from his eyes when he finally realised the full implications of Wasersztajn’s Jedwabne testimony. His formulation has provided a template for similar articulations. For example, Janicka and Żukowski write of the knowledge of Jedwabne as the eruption of what ‘could not be ignored appear[ing] in the field of vision’ (Janicka and Żukowski 2016, 7). Zubrzycki describes Jedwabne as ‘a cipher of repressed Polish memory suddenly uncovered, a rattling serpent previously asleep before the rock was turned over’ (Zubrzycki 2013, 99). Language associated with stains and blind spots is frequently used in such statements. Sadowska describes Polish wartime violence as ‘the black stain on our history’ (Sadowska 2012b). Jedlicki makes reference to ‘the darkness lurking in our collective history’ (Jedlicki cited in Bikont 2015, 9). Repeatedly, we hear that once the ‘blind spot’ becomes visible, it cannot be situated within the current ‘apparatus of knowledge’ (Żukowski 2017, 265). Writer and Holocaust scholar Eva Hoffman recalls that she ‘did not know how to absorb [Jedwabne] into my picture of Poland under the Nazi occupation’ (2005, 225). If what is finally seen doesn’t fit into the frame of Holocaust history as conventionally conceived, then we may need to shift the frame. In describing his film Aftermath (2012), Pasikowski has written that the narrative’s ‘crisis’, which entails the discovery that Catholic Poles were responsible for the mass murder of their Jewish neighbours, ‘forces us to re-verify our previous judgments, and […] to look differently at our official history’ (Aftermath DVD booklet, 2012).2 This

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may involve taking what was previously at the peripheries of our attention, such as Polish gentile violence towards Jewish Poles, and placing it at the centre of the frame. Dobrosielski, for example, notes how frequently the relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles have been considered ‘marginal’ to Holocaust history (2017, 378). Meanwhile, for many Jewish people attempting to hide amongst Catholic  Poles, Polish actions were absolutely central to their continued existence (2017, 379). Framing is always an ongoing political act, dependent on ‘mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion’ (Dziuban 2014a,  38). To draw attention to framing is to consider the activity of making visible and rendering invisible, as a process of political and social construction (Dziuban 2014a, 38). Framing is also a term that has a particular significance for aesthetic practices, and, of course, for cinema. Much of the language of sudden visibility and transformation that has been used in relation to the emergence of knowledge about Jedwabne is highly suggestive for the films under discussion in this book. As noted in Chap. 1, the four films analysed here do not represent instances of Polish wartime perpetration, but rather stage the revelatory moments in which awareness about them emerges or crystallises. Rather than considering how Polish perpetration is visually represented, we are led towards contemplating how it has been framed in the aftermaths.3 In light of Holbein’s anamorphic rendering of the blur in The Ambassadors as a skull, it seems fitting that, in three of the films I discuss, moments of shock are bound up with the sudden emergence of a skull into the field of vision. In Birthplace (Łoziński, 1992), the field of vision is also a literal field, which yields the skull of Abram Grynberg, while in Aftermath and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) skulls are unearthed from swamplands and forests. As I will expand on below and in subsequent chapters, the moments in which human remains emerge force characters and viewers to reframe their understanding of history and of their present reality. Simultaneously, the shock of exhumation affects the cinematic frame and patterns of editing, ushering in moments of ellipsis, disjunction and cross-cutting that register epistemological upheaval on the level of film form. Shocking revelations are thus conceptually and aesthetically structured into the films; they are also, however, embedded in a temporal unfolding that has a variety of rhythms and launches different ways of ‘coming-to-­ know’. The sudden revelation is not the only way to consider the emergence of knowledge about Polish perpetration. Alongside descriptions of shock and sudden unveiling, Gross himself has described Polish awareness of atrocity as a ‘slow dawning’ (2003, 22). It Looks Pretty From A Distance

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(Sasnal and Sasnal, 2011), which, incidentally, does not contain an exhumation scene and thus foregoes this most visible moment of shock, perhaps best exemplifies this way of expressing coming-to-know. The film relies on a gradual accumulation of significance through an extended allegorical mode. The pivotal moment in this allegory comes mid-way through the film, when we learn that, at some point during the war, two Jewish women drowned themselves in the local river ‘from fear’ (an incident taken from Wasersztajn’s Jedwabne testimony). This story, told causally during a family meal, does not seem to be received by the characters as a shock at all, but is absorbed as easily as the food that they are consuming (see Fig.  6.2). Nor does the cinematic frame register any disturbance. With this knowledge, however, the film encourages its viewers to begin to look differently at the behaviour of the village residents, and to realise the extent to which the wartime mechanisms of othering, exclusion and looting are continually reactivated.

Anamorphosis II: The Lure The massacres in and around Jedwabne, and similar incidents of mass and individual violence, are, of course, crimes. In some cases, these crimes were tried in courts in the decades after WWII, though many trials were perfunctory and affected by political propaganda.4 The Institute of National Remembrance conducted its own official investigation into the Jedwabne murders in the early 2000s. It is hardly surprising, then, that the language of investigation and detection permeates the ways in which the emergence of unwanted knowledge related to Polish perpetration is framed. Gross, for example, has been described as a kind of detective undertaking an ‘investigation’ into a historical murder, in which he must suppress the customary scepticism towards victim testimony (Łysak 2011, 893). Such language is pervasive in the cultural sphere too. The photographer Łukasz Baksik, whose project photographing re-purposed Jewish gravestones across Poland will be discussed shortly, framed his quest to track down the stones as ‘like detective work’ (Baksik 2012, 38). Waligórska has noted that the post-Jedwabne period has seen a surge in popular crime fiction featuring Jewish characters (2013, 157). ‘[P]ainful topics like anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish violence’ are filtered through narratives featuring characters investigating crimes and solving mysteries (2013, 157). A significant number of the post-Jedwabne films concerning Polish historic crimes against their Jewish neighbours are made in the style of the thriller or crime film. Films such as Demon (Wrona, 2015), Ziarno

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Prawdy/Grain of Truth (Lankosz, 2015), and Sekret/The Secret (Wojcieszek, 2012) feature protagonists who uncover family and local secrets, forcing confrontations with the ‘guardians of silence’, and usually (but not always) discovering the secrets of the past (Żukowski 2018b, 411). Aftermath, of the films under discussion in this book, mobilises this investigative structure most explicitly, as a number of mysteries are posed and unraveled, including the ‘disappearance’ of the Jewish residents. Birthplace and Ida also, however, contain echoes of this investigative structure, embedding within it some of the shocks of revelation that they conjure. Each of these three films sets into motion a quest for knowledge, involving the interrogation of witnesses, bystanders and perpetrators, the location of burial sites, and the exhumation of evidence. In each film, too, the investigation is led by those who are constructed as ‘outsiders’. In Ida and Birthplace, the characters are Jewish, which immediately grants them an ‘otherness’ in the eyes of the Polish Catholic residents; in Aftermath the Kalina brothers become ‘symbolic Jews’, that is, those who are seen to ‘side with’ Jewish people over non-Jewish Poles (Zubrzycki 2006, 148; see Chap. 1). These diegetic constructions of the ‘outsider’ posing difficult and unwanted questions to a Polish Catholic community echo the ways in which some actual public figures have been characterised (or caricatured). In some of the criticisms of Ida, for example, Pawlikowski has been positioned as someone who, having left Poland as a teenager, no longer wielded the requisite authority or knowledge to comment upon its history. It is Gross, however, who has been most frequently attacked in this manner, which is, for some, indicative of how a concern with Poland’s image abroad is prioritised over uncovering local histories of violence (see, e.g., Żukowski 2018a, 13–14). The ‘outsider’ poses a threat in part because their international status ensures that Poland’s unwanted knowledge will spread outside its borders. Constructing cultural works along the lines of investigative structures and via the genres of the criminal investigation carries a number of potentially problematic implications. Waligórska draws attention to how post-­ Jedwabne detective fiction utilises utopian narratives of retributive justice in order to allow readers to relieve guilt about past Polish crimes. The ways in which horrific histories are presented as a riddle to be solved provide audiences with a consolatory vision of a secure, stable and ‘knowable universe’ (Waligórska 2013, 144). I am reminded, here, of the feeling of satisfaction that anamorphosis promises upon the recognition of the blur as a skull. Aptly, Dolar describes this sensation using the vocabulary of investigative genres, comparing the impression of finally seeing the skull

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with the ‘sudden revelation of the clue to it all whose solution, as in all good detective stories, has been there right under our noses’ (2015, 137). This vision of anamorphosis as bringing clarity to the blot in the visual field is, he warns, misleading, ‘a lure’, for it ‘depends on the supposition that this hidden meaning can be had, is something one can get a hold of’ (2015, 136, 137). In ‘solving’ the riddle of the stain, we might bring some clarity to it, but we lose the structure of dislocation that made the stain possible. By assuming that we are ‘seeing the hidden image within the blur’, and understanding what it ‘means’, we draw attention away from what produced it in the first place. We lose ‘the blur itself, the distortion, the break, the crack, the division of the visible and the intelligible’ (Dolar 2015, 138). ‘What counts’, Dolar (2015, 139) argues, ‘is not the content of the hidden message, but the torsion itself.’ I want to adapt Dolar’s words to think about some of the more problematic implications of the repeated expressions of ‘shock’ following the Jedwabne revelations. A number of commentators have noted that the language of shock, though genuine and authentic for many, has also been instrumentalised and repeated as an empty gesture, without enacting the reframing that many scholars feel to be crucial. For Żukowski, expressions of shock create a misleading impression that Polish perpetration was entirely unknown, and emerged suddenly from nowhere (2018b, 389). The ‘lack’ of knowledge about Polish perpetration was, he argues, carefully and deliberately constructed, the effect of a series of choices that consistently ‘whitewashed’ the Polish treatment of Jewish people in the Holocaust (2018b, 389). The muting of archival and literary material that spoke frankly of Polish violence took a ‘collective effort’ of evasion (2018b, 389). This deliberate silencing and not-seeing is the ‘torsion’ that made the blind spot possible. Expressions of shock might only momentarily disrupt habits of evasion before the unwanted knowledge is co-opted into a cathartic and redemptive experience for the dominant majority. In the analyses of the films in this book, I will consider how some of these trajectories of knowledge can be framed as a conflict between, on the one hand, the need to investigate, know, gather evidence and make evident, and, on the other hand, the desire to avoid a facile satisfaction that comes with the ‘case closed’ finale of detective genres. One can trace this pattern already in Gross’s initial revelation of the crime. ‘I do not’, he writes in the opening pages of Neighbours, ‘see the possibility of attaining closure here […] the reader will not emerge with a sense of satisfied yearning for knowledge at the conclusion of reading’ (2003, 12).

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As Gross was well aware, it is nevertheless dangerous to proceed with research or representation as though Jedwabne and similar atrocities were ultimately ‘unknowable’. The ‘blind spots’ and ‘stains’ should not be conflated with the ineffable black holes of trauma, where what traumatises the subject(s) escapes conscious knowledge and articulation (Dobrosielski 2017, 370).5 Many of the problems with such frameworks have been discussed at length in relation to Holocaust representation in general. As LaCapra has written, focusing on the ‘unrepresentable’ nature of the Holocaust often activates a ‘hyperbolic aesthetic of the sublime’, which prompts a ‘foreclosure, denigration or inadequate account not only of representation but of the difficult issue of ethically responsible agency both then and now’ (2001, 93).6 It may not be so much a question of what we do not understand, as Gillian Rose reminds us, as ‘what we do not want to understand’ (1996, 43). Such issues continue to be raised in new contexts, for example, in the recent analyses of ‘perpetrator trauma’ (Morag 2013), and the anxiety and uncertainty that has emerged around the conjunction of trauma theory and cultural representations of Holocaust perpetration (Adams 2012, 3). In the Polish case, scholars have warned that many elements of Western trauma theory, such as the emphasis on the inexpressible and the unsayable, should not simply be transferred to the Polish Catholic experience of the Holocaust. Given the anti-Jewish attitudes in some Polish communities, and the benefits reaped from Jewish absence, to cast silence around the experience of the Holocaust can be evasive. Silence perpetuates a violence that protects those in power (Janicka 2018, 59). The suppositions that the traumatic experience of the Holocaust for non-Jewish Poles cannot be verbalised indicate, for many scholars, an aversion to critical self-reflection, not an ‘aporia’ of knowledge (Guturow et al. 2010, 4). If every act of framing is also one of exclusion, then it is imperative to consider what the recent re-framings of Polish perpetration might have spotlighted, and what might have been left out of the frame. For example, despite research positing that Polish perpetrators came from many different backgrounds (not just the margins of society) and that violence occurred in various environments, post-Jedwabne public discourse and culture has arguably created a convenient scapegoat: the Polish ‘peasant.’ This figure, often depicted as primitive, dirty and inherently violent, has, Dobrosielski argues, become the new Polish ‘other’, second only to the Jewish ‘other’ (2017, 376). New blind spots thus appear in the reframed picture of Polish violence. The actions and influence of the ‘elites’, middle

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classes and administrators, rural landowners, intellectuals and the Church persist out of frame (Dobrosielski 2017, 374; Janicka 2014/2015, 216; see also Chmielewska 2018). The once ‘unwanted’ image of the Polish ‘peasant’ engaging in acts of violence against their Jewish neighbour can thus become relatively desirable. I return to these issues more extensively in my analysis of It Looks Pretty (in Chap. 6), a film that explicitly mobilises disgust towards rural Poles.

Framing Knowledge and Theorising Meaning Via the framework of anamorphosis and the vocabulary of the blind spot, this chapter has begun to sketch out a number of different ways in which ‘coming-to-know’ has been configured in relation to the unwanted awareness of Polish perpetration. This spectrum of knowing encompasses diverse practices and motivations, from the investigative drive that recurs across historical and cultural works, to the ways in which silences and voids might be constructed as a continued process of censoring or evasion wrought by a dominant majority. In this section, I focus on the different theoretical frameworks deployed in this book and consider some of the ways in which Levinas, Derrida and Didi-Huberman negotiate knowing and meaning. These three theorists have been chosen for the productive openings that their work provides towards the four films discussed in this book. I am particularly interested in how they articulate some forms of knowing as processes of domination and totalisation. Remaining open to not-­knowing, on the other hand, has been seen as the basis for more ethical and engaged relationships with others, texts, spectres, and art images. The ways in which ambiguity, the not-quite visible, and the indeterminable are valorised might seem dangerously close to the kinds of attitudes that Polish scholars are criticising in relation to histories of Polish perpetration; that is, the ways in which ‘ambiguity’ and ‘complexity’ have been mobilised as alibis for not speaking directly and in full about Polish violence. Subsequent chapters will embrace this disjunction as a productive tension, and trace its impact across the competing needs, ideas and concerns of the four films. For now, I will focus on presenting a series of overlapping theoretical frames that will help to articulate particular configurations of knowing and not-knowing.

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Levinas: Revelation Beyond Comprehension Although Levinas did not write extensively about the Holocaust, many commentators have pointed out that the Shoah had an immense impact on his philosophy. As Spargo argues, ‘Levinas casts the Holocaust as a submerged historical referent for the face-to-face relation of ethics’ (2006, 66). Surveying Western philosophical traditions, Levinas argued that ethics and alterity were consistently neglected in favour of questions of ontology or being.7 Western ontologies, in his view, attempt to ‘comprehend or grasp’ the self and the other (Levinas 1969, 46). Inherent in these attempts is a particular formulation of knowing, in which ‘thought makes sense of everything that is foreign to it, explains it (endows it with meaning and gives it order)’ (Kenaan 2013, 24). Levinas, however, resisted making ‘the unintelligible intelligible’; for Kenaan, then, Levinasian philosophy ‘is, above all, a theory of meaning’ (2013, 23, 28). In an ethical relation, the other person cannot be reduced to the concept that I have of them, to an ‘epistemological feature’ (Critchley 2002, 11). The other will always remain an enigma to the self. As Critchley explains, ‘there is something about the other person, a dimension of separateness, interiority, secrecy or what Levinas calls “alterity” that escapes my comprehension’ (2002, 26). The failure to acknowledge that the other exceeds the bounds of one’s understanding can be, and has been, catastrophic. Just such a failure becomes visible in anti-Semitism and was, for many scholars, epitomised by the Holocaust (Critchley 2002, 26). Anti-Semitism reduces the other to a category and a stereotype, producing an ‘otherness’ that is very different from what Levinas means when he discusses the radical ‘otherness’ of every other person. In Polish culture, Jewish people have so often occupied the position of the ‘other’ that it seems particularly vital to emphasise this point. As Zylinska writes, in Poland the positioning of Jewish people as ‘intrinsically other’, ‘accompanied by thinking in terms of a radical “self/other” separation, is in fact the sine qua non condition for the birth of anti-Semitism’ (Zylinska 2005, 111).8 Levinas’s writing on the stranger and the neighbour, a complexly articulated dynamic that changed several times over the course of his life, seems particularly apt for thinking about the Polish-Jewish relationship. Levinas considered how, in the moment of our responsibility for them, strangers draw close to us to become neighbours to whom we offer hospitality and welcome (Spargo 2006, 178). On the other hand, neighbours can become estranged, and neighbourliness

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reconceived as a relation of exclusion rather than welcome (2006, 178). In Gross’s Neighbours, Spargo argues, ‘there is evidence enough to give us permanent pause about the credentials of neighbourliness, as practically lived proximity, when it comes to inspiring ethics’ (2006, 178). In the case of Jedwabne, Poles treated their Jewish neighbours ‘as inherent strangers and thus, by close etymological and genealogical association, also as enemies (in Latin, hostis, foreign or hostile others)’ (2006, 178). Such a treatment represented a ‘turning from the other’ (2006, 180). For Zylinska, too, Jedwabne signalled a ‘failure in the ethics of neighbourly hospitality, in which the preservation of the integrity of our “home” happened at the expense of the not-always-wanted neighbour’s death’ (2007, 286). In Levinasian thought, it is the face or visage of the other that calls forth my responsibility, beyond the limits of totalising thought. The face has meaning in itself, though a contradictory one (Levinas 1999, 169). The face of the other is vulnerable, but also authoritative enough to instigate a command to preserve life (Levinas 1999, 105). ‘The face of the other’, Levinas wrote, ‘exposed to my look and in its weakness and its mortality […] orders me: Thou shalt not kill’ (Levinas 1999, 104). It is in this obligation expressed via the face, rather than through geographical proximity, that ‘the Other becomes my neighbour’ and calls my own subjectivity into question (Hand 2009, 42). The visage cannot, however, be precisely mapped onto the human face, nor does it refer exclusively or exactly to something that we can see. As Saxton (2007, 5) explains, ‘despite his use of vocabulary associated with vision, Levinas strips the face of its habitual meanings as a phenomenon that appears in the visible world’. She cites Levinas: ‘one can say that the face is not “seen”. It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond’ (2007, 5). Rather than appearing to me, ‘the face expresses, signifies and speaks, addressing and commanding me from a position beyond the perceptual field’ (Saxton 2007, 5). For Kenaan, the Levinasian face is a ‘visitation’ rather than an object, a ‘kind of movement, the crossing of a border’, the action ‘of facing something, of addressing, of turning toward’ (2013, 34). Given that Levinas tended to associate visuality and looking with an oppressive and totalising knowledge, there are particular challenges in deploying his ethical philosophy to discuss visual arts such as cinema. As Saxton writes, ‘viewing films with Levinas always involves a degree of viewing against the iconoclastic thrust of his writings’ (Downing and Saxton 2010, 105). However, a number of film theorists have found the

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structural tensions between visuality and non-visuality in Levinas’s work to be productive, encouraging us to ‘look differently at the images on the screen, to seek out those fissures in their being through which alterity intrudes’ (Downing and Saxton 2010, 105). While cinema cannot directly emulate the immediacy of the ethical face-to-face encounter, particular kinds of viewing structures ‘might preserve the proximity and separation’ that leads us towards a ‘revelation of the Other’ (Downing and Saxton 2010, 100). For Cooper, documentary film in particular has the potential to interrogate ‘what it means to see an “ethical” image’. Through documentary, we might be led towards the realisation that ‘others are never fully knowable through the filmic image’ (Cooper 2006, 92). In Chap. 3, I will return to Leviansian thought in order to consider some of the relations posited between ‘neighbours’, ‘strangers’ and viewers in and through Birthplace. Derrida: Living-On, Living With If for Levinas the face of the other draws me into an ethical relation with something unknowable, a similar structure operates in Derrida’s writing concerning both texts and spectres.9 As Davis (2010, 30) has pointed out, for Derrida the text is an ‘other, it addresses me without speaking to me […] it offers and withholds itself at the same time’. This attentiveness to texts amounts to an ethical obligation to ‘preserve and respond to a singularity which speaks from a position of total otherness’ (30). Davis argues that both Derrida and Levinas are ‘overreaders’ of texts. In Derrida’s case this is best exemplified by the deconstructive method, which ‘attempt[s] to traverse the event of the text in its utter singularity, to stand exposed— and obliged to respond—to its untameable strangeness’ (Davis 2010, 28). Reading, however, ‘can never be fully faithful’ or exhaustive, and there is always a residue unsettling stable meaning and interpretation (2010, 30). Derrida’s deconstruction, with its play of differences and deferrals, bears an intrinsic relationship to haunting (Burchill 2009, 166–167).10 Where Levinas pitted ethics against ontology, Derrida counters with hauntology, which ‘makes every concept a concept of the spectre and a spectre of a concept’ (Cholodenko 2004, 100). Derrida’s focus on the legacies of violent death has rendered his writing especially relevant for examining post-conflict culture, particularly where second and third generations inherit the burdens of memory work or mourning. Derrida envisaged both mourning and haunting as potentially endless and unknowable.

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Haunting, in his view, was not akin to the delivery of a message by a ghost or plea for proper burial, but something that brings ‘an insight into the limitations of what we currently know’ (Davis 2007, 88). The injunction of the spectral, like the address of the face for Levinas, is always ultimately inexplicable; it resists ‘the unveiling of the veiled’ (Saghafi 2010, 52). The unknowability of the ghost’s address is part of what keeps them with us. Spectrality is a kind of ‘living-on’ between life and death, and we must learn to ‘live with ghosts’ (Derrida 1994, xx, xviii). We also, in a sense, work for ghosts by acting ‘in the name of justice’ for those who are not present (Derrida 1994, xix). As Dziuban writes, ghosts testify to the ‘inherent violence’ of hegemonic structures and institutions; they ‘speak to and about erasures, exclusions, and invisibilities inherent to every social order, and to the (after)effects of repressive configurations of power’ (2019a,  11). Ghosts can, however, be invoked for various purposes; as mentioned in Chap. 1, ‘Jewish ghosts’ in Poland tend to be conjured by the dominant majority and made to partake in their redemption or catharsis (2019a, 14). In this way, Jewish lives continue to be othered and their deaths instrumentalised by non-Jewish Poles, indexing a ‘haunting continuity of othering and violence—as in life, so in death’ (2019a, 16). Dziuban thus aims to disentangle the question of haunting ‘from questions of memory and trauma’ and instead weave them into ‘questions of order, power, and hegemony’ (2019a, 16). I will return to this framing of haunting in Chap. 4. Particularly striking for the analysis of film is the relationship between the Derridean spectre and the notion of visibility. As Blanco and Peeren write, the very terms ‘specter’ and ‘spectrality’ ‘evoke an etymological link to visibility and vision, to that which is both looked at (as fascinating spectacle) and looking (in the sense of examining)’ (Blanco and Peeren 2013, 2). In Derrida’s network of spectral looking, the ghost is figured as a presence that looks at us, that concerns us, before and beyond our awareness of this look (1994, 6). This play of seeing and not seeing can productively be thought in dialogue with the concept of anamorphosis. As Ned Lukacher has argued, anamorphosis can be thought of as ‘Lacan’s figure for the way in which we “feel” seeing […] as an invisible materiality’, that is, as a feeling of being looked at even when we do not see who looks at us (Lukacher cited by Kear 1999, 181). One must keep in mind, of course, that Derrida’s critique of Lacan pointed to crucial differences between deconstruction and psychoanalysis, particularly as regards the production of meaning and knowledge. For Davis, Lacan’s reading of Poe’s ‘The

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Purloined Letter’ aptly demonstrates these differences. Derrida sees the Lacanian reading as one that attempts to seek the occluded meanings of texts, which ultimately are only those that the analyst already knows (Davis 2010, 115). Deconstruction, on the other hand, ‘aims to respect the text’s residue, which resists critical appropriation’ (Davis 2010, 115).11 Derrida’s pronouncements on the cinema do, however, fundamentally intertwine spectrality and psychoanalysis. During his appearance in Ghost Dance (McMullen, West Germany/UK, 1983), Derrida links psychoanalysis and spectrality through a mathematical formula: ‘cinema plus psychoanalysis equals a science of ghosts’. He later revises this aphorism, recognising that ‘ghosts do not allow for such a stable arithmetical formula. Ghosts, rather, introduce an element of heterogeneity into any scientific discourse’ (Cahill and Holland 2015, 7). The conjunction of spectrality, psychoanalysis and cinema takes up a large portion of Derrida’s otherwise sparse commentary on film.12 He uses the term ‘séance’ to stress the overlaps between cinema, haunting and psychoanalysis; in French, the term is used to designate both a film screening and an analytic session, which run for roughly the same amount of time, while also alluding to the conjuring of the dead. For Derrida, cinematic and psychoanalytic séances ‘address a similar urge, compulsion or drive: a necessary meeting or session with ghosts, a time to sit with them as they reappear and speak through projection and a medium’ (Cahill and Holland 2015, 7). Didi-Huberman: Knowledge and Not-Knowledge In my brief reading across Derridean and Levinasian theory I have pointed to formulations of how we are obliged to respond to the address of an other—whether this is conceptualised as a text, spectre or visage—without necessarily being able to grasp the full implications of this address or to absorb it into a totalising epistemology. The configurations of knowing and not-knowing posited by these frameworks resonate in productive ways with the work of Didi-Huberman. In Confronting Images, Didi-Huberman outlines his resistance to a particular tradition of art history that searches for definitive meaning within an image, and that assumes that we can ‘translate all concepts into images, all images into concepts’ such that ‘in the end everything lines up and fits together perfectly in the discourse of knowledge’ (2005, 3). Such a translation performs a ‘closure of the visible onto the legible’ and the ‘intelligible’ (3). The art object is thus reduced to ‘delivering discrete, visible elements of signification—elements

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discernable as signs’ (11). He associates this method of reading art with a ‘badly understood’ Freudianism, which postulates that the visible can be ‘cut up’ into its constituent details, and ‘since everything can be seen, exhaustively described, everything will be known’ (231). Didi-Huberman decries the way in which the art historian acts like ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (269) in seeking the ‘code’ in the image, which is waiting to be found like a ‘body in the closet’. Once found, ‘this will be the “solution” of the painting, its “motive” and its “confession”’, as though the ‘painting had committed a crime’ (231–232). Didi-Huberman’s language here strongly recalls the investigative vocabulary used by Dolar in explicating the ‘lure’ of anamorphosis in Lacanian terms. It should be noted, too, that DidiHuberman explicitly draws on Lacan to describe the ‘gaze-power’ of the image, its ability to look at and implicate us (2005, 158). Didi-Huberman’s writing also resonates with a Levinasian critique of ‘totalising’ vision and knowledge. When Didi-Huberman criticises the approach to art that attempts to name ‘everything that one reads in the visible’ (2005, 3), I am reminded of Levinas’s wariness of ‘penetrating and decoding the unknown’ (Kenaan 2013, 23–24). Didi-Huberman counsels us to approach the art image with an openness to ‘not-knowledge’, that is, to allow ourselves ‘to experience a constitutive and central rift’ in what we think we know (2005, 7). Images do not simply ‘transmit’ knowledge. Indeed, their ‘efficacy’ is dependent on an interweaving ‘of transmitted and dismantled knowledges, or produced and transformed not-­ knowledges’ (2005, 16). Images both materialise in front of us and withdraw from us, and these processes must be considered together, as part of what he calls their ‘anadyomene movement’ (2005, 143). He uses the term ‘anadyomene’ to suggest something plunging into water, emerging and plunging in again. The paradox or dialectic of the image places us, he argues, between seeing and knowing, where we must think the ‘fabric’ of representation with its ‘rend’, and the symbol ‘with its interruption’ (2005, 144). Once again, this is reminiscent of Levinas’s thinking about the visage, which is not a visual phenomenon yet paradoxically evokes visuality. As Kenaan writes, ‘even if what is central in the face is not visual […] this non-visuality is located at the very core of the visible’ (2013, 36). Further, in language that echoes Didi-Huberman, Kenaan notes that for Levinas the ‘epiphany’ of the face ‘takes place through the unravelling of the visual fabric from which it emerges’ (2013, 37). A good example of Didi-Huberman’s approach to the image comes in his account of encountering Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation

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(c. 1440–1441), which is painted on the wall of a cell in a Florentine monastery. Entering the cell, Didi-Huberman recalls being immediately struck by two things. First, the light from the window briefly impeded his view of the fresco; he calls this a ‘luminous obfuscation’ (2005, 11). Secondly, he noticed that a vast area of the wall had been painted white, against which the swarms of colour and figures seemed initially dwarfed. We are ‘predisposed’, he argues, to ignore both the light and the apparently featureless wall in order to ‘read’ the painting symbolically. By contrast, DidiHuberman encourages us to consider the light and the wall as essential visual components of the image that, rather than representing something, grasp and envelop us with their opaque materality (2005, 17). He refers to such zones in the image as ‘pans’ that materially ‘surge forth’ to disturb our symbolic readings (2005, 266). Responding to Didi-Huberman’s account of the materiality of painting, Walden connects his initial encounter with the art work to a film-­ phenomenology that highlights our embodied and sensory responses to cinematic images (2019, 29). What has been less frequently acknowledged about Didi-Huberman’s writing is his pronounced concern with temporality. It is in part the time spent with an image that sets meaning and interpretation into flux. His account of how we might confront Fra Angelico’s painting highlights the importance of passing time: rather than ignore the light and the wall in our hurry to ‘read’ the image, he proposes that we ‘stay a moment longer, face to face’ with it (2005, 13). In this state of ‘suspended attention’, our interpretation has the time to unfold and ‘deploy itself in several dimensions’ (2005, 16). The specific ‘unfolding’ of images is not honoured if we immediately attempt to impose knowledge and meaning onto them (2005, 3). Didi-Huberman’s proposition that we linger with the image might be seen to cause particular difficulties for thinking about cinema, a medium that incessantly replaces one image with another in (an illusion of) continuous motion. It is apt, then, that when adapting Didi-Huberman’s thought for film studies Fowler has singled out the long-take as the technique that can place viewers in the state of ‘suspended attention’ outlined by Didi-Huberman (Fowler 2017, 243). However, Didi-Huberman’s thought is useful for thinking about other kinds of viewing experiences too, particularly in his emphasis on the continual movements towards and away from meaning and signification. The ‘anadyomene’ movements of emerging and receding that he finds in an image have resonance with

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notions of duration derived from the temporal philosophy of Henri Bergson. Bergson’s writing privileges the fluctuations or ‘insensible gradations’ between states of being, and emphasises the continual processes of change (Bergson 1976, 140). In previous work, I have suggested that Bergsonian duration provides a productive framework to think about the unfolding of cinematic images in time (Mroz 2012, 2014, 2015). I will return to this theoretical conjunction in Chap. 5.

Matter and Meaning: A Spectrum The theoretical frameworks discussed above mobilise ways of thinking about the reach of knowledge and meaning, and the points at which our ability to understand, know and signify might falter. In this section, I think more specifically about the role of matter and materiality within these conceptualisations. As Barad reminds us, matter is not an inert entity or a ‘blank slate’, but an active materialisation constantly congealing with discursive frameworks (2008, 139). In the four films analysed in this book, various forms of matter are configured as something that both pleads for and thwarts our attempts to frame the world as meaningful. This is particularly the case with human remains. In order to begin unpacking the films’ explorations of materiality, I turn to Emma Wilson’s writing on Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (France, 1955) as an exemplary instance of how human remains can become multiply resonant through film and in theory. Across several essays, Wilson describes the film’s attention to the ‘brute materiality’ of human remains (2012, 129). She notes how ‘the camera moves to witness unfathomable, inchoate masses of women’s hair, lifeless, dead matter’ (2012, 129). Resnais’s film frequently, Wilson argues, dwells on images of ‘matter and its metamorphosis’. For example, ‘shots of massed bones are followed by formally similar, treacherously benign, shots of cabbages fertilised by human matter’ (2012, 130). Resnais, she argues, forges a relationship between what cannot be seen (and is hard to imagine), and the ‘very matter that remains—the material remains, the relics and traces of past experience […] which seem conversely to offer material proof’ (Wilson 2005, 93). Later, Wilson revises some of her thoughts on the film, pointing out that what might appear to some viewers as brute matter might, for others, be a ‘knowable, lovable’ person. She thus warns of the ‘risk [of] reducing the human dead to matter and substance’ (2011, 129).

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Ranged on one side of the material spectrum, then, is formless, brute matter, which is difficult to shape into coherent frameworks of meaning. Wilson’s description of the potentially  ‘inchoate’ nature  of materiality draws partly on Kristeva, who I will return to below, but is also reminiscent of the writing of Georges Bataille. Where Wilson describes the treacherous growth of cabbages from human remains, Bataille drew attention to the disturbing productivity of fertilisation in describing the ‘swarming’ of ‘nauseating’ roots at the base of flowers (1985, 13).13 Describing his encounter with the spaces where bodies were burned in Auschwitz-­ Birkenau, Didi-Huberman draws on Bataille to record his horror at ‘the bizarre proliferation of white flowers on the exact spot of the cremation pits’ (2017, 100). These plants feed on human remains in a way that reminds him of Bataille’s negation of the ‘comforting value’ of flowers. While noting the Nazi drive to reduce the human bodies of the camps to lumps of matter, however, Wilson also considers how Night and Fog’s focus on materiality can forge complex haptic relationships with film viewers, bringing us towards and away from ‘distressingly tangible’ materialities (2011, 130). She notes that material remains have the potential to act as evidence in legal and political contexts, and may also become relics for the loved ones left behind in the wake of the Holocaust. The material spectrum in Wilson’s writing evokes a long philosophical tradition in which materiality acts as both a ‘suggestion and a suspension of signification’, to use McMahon’s words (2012, 64). McMahon draws on Sartre to consider how filmic matter can indicate a ‘withdrawal of meaning’ while also suggesting an ‘uncontained signification’, or plurality of uncertain meaning (2012, 62). Trotter, too, has drawn on Sartre (amongst other philosophers) in his own delineation of a spectrum of materiality and meaning in literature and film. Matter, he considers, often functions as the ‘“other side” of our relentless determination to attribute meaning and value to events in the lived world’ (2007, 49). Cinema’s detailing of material formations might carry ‘an excess of indeterminate over determinate meaning’ (2007, 53). He makes a distinction between ‘sense’ and ‘intelligibility’, where ‘sense’ relates to material presences that perhaps do not signify anything but are imbued with a near-palpability (2007, 61). ‘Sense’ is here ‘intelligibility’s anti-system’ or ‘counter-­ narrative’ (2007, 62). My analyses in this book will trace the ways in which the films mobilise materiality as part of their processes of coming-to-know. Material elements resonate metaphorically and symbolically. As noted in Chap. 1,

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human remains buried in the earth or under the home become expressive of a hidden violence at the heart of Polish history and identity, as metaphors become literalised. As Barad has argued, material formations and discursive frameworks, while not reducible to one another, are mutually implicated. ‘The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment’, she writes, ‘neither is articulated/articulable in the absence of the other’ (2008, 140). Barad’s thinking is resonant for film viewing, if we consider that film images are also material phenomena unfolding before us that we imbue with significance, and which inevitably become entangled with our processes of making matter meaningful. Human remains pulsate with a particular intensity in such processes. The exceptional role played by remains in frameworks of meaning is evidenced in our rituals of burial, beliefs about afterlives, and the outrage that we feel when the remains of our loved ones are not properly handled and treated (something particularly important for the films under discussion in this book). And yet, at the same time, images of human remains can also be radically ‘illusion destroying’ (Trotter 2010, 165). Achille Mbembe has written of a ‘stubborn will to mean, to signify something’ that he finds in human remains (2003, 35).14 Slightly rephrasing this, I would argue that human remains might spark instead our own desperate attempts to make remains signify, to ensure that our ‘knowable, lovable others’ are somehow removed from the ‘brute materiality’ that they threaten to become. Distinctions between human matter and other material forms are at times radically undermined in the films I discuss. Human remains threaten to slide towards what Trigg has termed the ‘anonymous materiality’ of a world that refuses to be wrestled into meaningful frameworks (2012, 218). Kristeva, whose work is crucial for my analysis of It Looks Pretty in Chap. 6, considers human remains to be the ultimate in abjection. The corpse, she argues, provokes an evacuation of meaning, ‘draw[ing] me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (1982, 1–2). For Kristeva, abjection broadly refers to the bodily and psychological revolts against that which threatens one’s material and psychological boundaries. The state of abjection, however, describes a failure of complete expulsion; the abject is ‘something rejected from which one does not part’, an ambiguous border that continually threatens us with meaninglessness (Kristeva 1982, 4). Drawing out in particular Kristeva’s writing on the Holocaust, Chare has explained that in ‘extreme situations’ we can no longer police ‘contact with the abject’ or limit our interaction with that which threatens us (2011, 64–65). ‘Surrounded at every turn by horror and death’ he writes,

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‘the protective mechanism that is abjection is overwhelmed’. We are reduced to ‘a body and nothing more’, to ‘the matter of the body that lies behind its culturally-constructed contours’ (2011, 65). When the safeguards of abjection collapse and one is unable to ‘radically exclude’ one may find oneself crushed under ‘a weight of meaninglessness’ (Kristeva 1982, 2). This, I will argue in Chap. 6, is what happens in the village of It Looks Pretty, where the structures of expulsion have been thwarted, leaving the villagers wading amongst material remnants, wastes and messes of all kinds.

‘Landscape with Jewish Corpse’ Later sections of this chapter will return to bodies and human remains. For now, I want to consider the role played by material formations of a different kind, turning specifically to earth, soil, vegetation and other elements of the natural environment, and the way in which they are framed as landscape. Landscapes provide a productive example of the mutual articulation of the material and the discursive. As Don Mitchell has written, landscape is always a ‘material form’, as well as an ‘ideological representation’ (1996, 34–35). Landscapes are frequently emblematic of the nation. In Poland, field and forest landscapes in particular have played a significant role in constructions of nationhood and identity; both index emotional, often nostalgic, ties to familiar environments (Kaczmarek 2017, 232). As so often in national imaginaries, fields of golden wheat or green crops, associated with fertility, innocence, and folk traditions, are particularly iconic. The forest has a complex and multi-dimensional set of associations in the Polish imaginary, as a primeval space of folk tale, a site associated with the history of Polish uprisings and a space of Polish victimhood (for example, in the mass murders of Poles at Katyń forest).15 The production of landscape through discourse, representation and iconography is not neutral, nor are landscapes fixed and immutable, though their associations may seem to change little over time (Mitchell 1996, 35). W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that we consider landscape as a process of subject formation rather than as an object (Mitchell 1994, 1). This process is, as Don Mitchell elaborates, ‘dripping with power’: ‘landscapes are acts of contested discipline, channeling spatial practices into certain patterns and presenting to the world images of how the world (presumably) works and who it works for’ (1996, 34–35). In offering ‘specific configurations of power and particular visions of reality’ landscapes are

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predicated upon exclusion and violence; that is, the rejection of other visions of how the world works and ‘who it works for’, and the expulsion or extermination of other people with competing claims to land (Dziuban 2014a, 39). As Janicka sums up, citing Dumas: ‘the history of genocide is also the history of the landscape’ (2018, 7). After Jedwabne, once-familiar Polish landscapes have been discursively and materially reframed. Buoyant fields and primeval forests are suddenly revealed to have a repressed underside, as though one turned over a rock and discovered something violently crushed beneath. Indeed, in another indication of how the literal and the figurative are co-implicated in Polish visual culture, one can point to a number of represented moments in which blocks of stone have been turned over to reveal that what one might have thought was an ordinary paving slab was in fact a Jewish tombstone, ripped from its place in a cemetery and trodden on for decades afterwards (I return to this in a moment). Once again, some of Gross’s work epitomises the ways in which Polish landscapes have been cast in a new, sinister light. In Golden Harvest, written with Grudzińska-Gross, he closely analyses a now infamous photograph from the early post-war period showing a group of people posing for the camera in what looks like a sandy field. The photograph draws on a familiar ‘harvest iconography’ in which ‘peasants’ are arranged around the fruits of their labours (2012, 9). The people in the photograph are posing not with crops, however, but with skulls and neatly crossed bones, and the ‘sand’ is the ashy remnants of victims from the Treblinka crematoria. Gross argues that the image shows a group of people who have just been apprehended raking through the ash looking for gold teeth and other valuables.16 This is, he posits, a depiction of a golden harvest not of wheat but of an entirely different kind, a bounty reaped from a landscape of Jewish death (2012, 10). A number of scholars have also shifted attention away from the Polish forest as a site of heroism and considered, instead, forested spaces as sites of Polish perpetration and the unmarked burials of Jewish victims. Jewish people hiding in forests were in danger from Polish gamekeepers, forest authorities, and partisans, who could denounce, rob and kill them (Kaczmarek 2017, 226–228). In forests, Jewish people could be hunted like ‘abhorred nuisance animals’ (Weiner Weber 2008, 44). As Janicka has pointed out, Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) had already pointed to the role of the Polish forest as both a tool and site of genocide (as German occupiers used trees to camouflage their concentration and death camps). Post-­ Jedwabne, some works of visual culture have reframed the forest as a space

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of Polish violence. For example, Wilhelm Sasnal’s 2003 painting Las (‘Forest’) remediates a frame from Shoah in which Lanzmann, a translator and a Holocaust survivor walk across a field with a forest backdrop at Sobibór. In the painting, the three small figures at the bottom of the frame are dwarfed by deranged and inchoate swirls of green paint, as the Polish forest materialises threat and oppression.17 It Looks Pretty, the film that Wilhelm Sasnal later made with Anka Sasnal, opens in the forest as men lay traps for animals, and it continues to show the Polish forest as itself a trap. Indeed, one of the first images of the film frames our vision of the forest quite literally through a wire noose, and thus figuratively through the threat (or promise) of violence (Fig. 2.1). Forests in Birthplace, Ida and Aftermath reverberate with threatening energies, and are scattered with the bones of Jewish murder victims. Aftermath and It Looks Pretty also put on display the bucolic, familiar pastures and wheat fields of rural Poland, before we become aware that they have been produced in part through the violent removal of their Jewish residents and the appropriation of their land. Below this earth lies their unmarked graves. The Polish landscape must thus be retitled, becoming, to use Żukowski’s phrase, the ‘Landscape with Jewish Corpse’ (2018a, 87).

Fig. 2.1  The forest in It Looks Pretty framed as a potentially lethal trap

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Anamorphosis III: Landscape The development of landscape painting charts a history of domination that is as much about perspective and framing as representation. Painted landscapes fix the natural world within a framed view, displayed and arranged from a single vantage point for the enjoyment of an elevated onlooker (Berger 1972, 9; Ivakhiv 2013, 79). This commanding view of the environment conveys ‘a sense of the world being revealed, yielding its meaning, to an individual human gaze’ (Gilberto Perez cited by Ivakhiv 2013, 80). In the new Polish ‘landscape with Jewish corpse’, space is radically reformulated. Not only is there a disruptive element introduced into the visual field that disjoins our previous understanding of it, but something in the frame often seems to be looking back at us, unsettling our omniscient, comfortable gaze. Once again, we encounter the structure of anamorphosis. Although The Ambassadors is not a landscape as such, I want to return to Silverman’s discussion of it here as particularly useful for my argument about reframed post-Jedwabne spaces. Silverman describes how framing and perspective is connected to questions of epistemology: the perspectival image accords with what we take as ‘reality’, and offers a sense of empowerment through knowledge. The blur or stain in the frame undoes this. The painting, writes Silverman, is thus ‘organised according to two competing systems of intelligibility—one perspectival, one anamorphic’, which are in such acute conflict that they cannot both be seen clearly at the same time (Silverman 1996, 177). This visual incommensurability has its thematic counterpart: the perspectival vision celebrates human thought and ability, while the skull suggests the futility of all human endeavour (Silverman 1996, 177). To indicate how I adapt the structure of anamorphosis in the context of post-Jedwabne landscapes, I want to turn to Łukasz Baksik’s Matzevot for Everyday Use.18 This photography project documents Baksik’s search for Jewish gravestones that had been re-purposed as paving stones and grindstones. Most of the photographs in the album are arranged in a specific way: first, there is a ‘long-shot’ of a seemingly ordinary landscape, such as a path in a forest, a playground, or a building. In the next image, a particular area is enlarged (into a ‘mid-shot’), and more details of the space are shown: some disturbed soil on the forest path, for example, or writing visible on a curb stone. The third image confronts us directly with this disturbance; in a ‘close-up’, we can see the details of what we now realise was a gravestone fragment embedded in the dirt, on the road, in the wall.

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The photographs thus enact a series of perspectival changes, each of which reveals something that was hidden or unclear in the previous image. The photographs as a series ‘dramatize’, to use Silverman’s term, our ‘blind spot’, and do so in two different ways (1996, 177). Some reveal what has been entirely unavailable to our vision (under the ‘rock’) though ever-­ present. In other images, the Hebrew writing on the matzevot has always been visible, but not properly seen in the otherwise ‘everyday’ landscape. As Żukowski writes, ‘the traces of the murdered Jews lie on the surface, but one doesn’t recognize them’ (2018b, 417). In Baksik’s work, not only are we confronted with the becoming-visible of the Jewish gravestone, but we are encouraged to look back, and differently, at these landscapes. Through a temporal process of moving between ‘long-shot’, ‘close-up’, and back again, these everyday spaces are suddenly seen in a new light. While the skull in The Ambassadors imbues the perspectival image with decay and death, the points of anamorphosis in Baksik’s images, the fragments of matzevot, give rise to more concrete ideas. A ‘productive look’ shows us Jewish death and desecration in particular as the repressed underside of Polish landscapes. This landscape ‘reveals the violence at its foundations’, which is perpetuated whenever the tombstones are walked upon (Żukowski 2018b, 418). In Aftermath, Baksik’s work finds its echo in Józef’s overturning of the seemingly blank slabs surfacing a road, which turn out to be repurposed Jewish gravestones. These stones, subsequently ‘planted’ in a field of golden wheat, introduce a destabilising element into a sweeping rural landscape that is displayed for our view from a high-angle perspective (Fig. 2.2). In Chap.

Fig. 2.2  Aftermath: landscape with matzevot

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4, I will trace the ways in which Aftermath’s matzevot form part of a visual network in which images and objects seem to look back at the viewer. In the other films under discussion, landscapes become subject to reframings that affect our perspective and encourage us to look upon them differently. The frozen landscapes of Birthplace and Ida seem hostile to both the characters who attempt to rediscover a ‘home’ within them, and to viewers, who may find, through decentred compositions or audiovisual disjunctions, that it is difficult to effect a ‘masterful perspective’ and inscribe themselves within the filmed space. Temporal ellipses disjoin coherent space and linear time. It Looks Pretty presents us with distanced, framed landscapes before propelling us forward amongst the cruel people who live in them, as the film continually offers and then withdraws coherent linear perspectives.

Posthumous Ecologies In Chap. 1, I briefly commented on the sites of suffering and death in Jedwabne shown in the opening few minutes of Arnold’s …Where Is My Older Son Cain? (1999). At the body of water where Jewish women and children drowned, there seem to be no visible traces of the event: neither monuments nor obvious changes to the landscape. I mentioned that such sites are frequently thought of as voided spaces of nothingness that thwart our attempts to make meaning from them. For Baer, these ‘voids’ expose us to ‘the site of a destruction so extreme that it seems to swallow up the possibility of ascribing meaning to it, even though it is indisputably significant’ (Baer 2002, 80). In Chap. 5, I will consider how similarly voided images are mobilised in Ida as part of its exploration of grief, as the film draws together the ‘indisputably significant’ with meaning’s erosion. Here, I want to give space to other ways of approaching unmarked sites of atrocity, further explicating the concept of the ‘non-site of memory’ that Sendyka has proposed to discuss them. Although the term ‘non-site’ might seem to suggest an empty space, Sendyka and others have been challenging this idea. While the sites might not be marked by traditional commemorative signs, the knowledge of what took place there is often passed down through generations, and the spaces become encoded with different meanings (Sendyka 2017, 88). As Sendyka explains, the violence enacted in these environments means that they can neither be entirely negated in local memory, nor articulated and absorbed into the narrative of local history. The spaces often threaten the ‘self-conception’ of

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communities living in the area by reminding people of their own complicity in violence, looting or failure to honour the dead. The sites, and the events that took place there, thus exist ‘askew’ of local histories and memories. Communities find ways of co-existing with these spaces, by allowing them to become overgrown, or ‘manipulating’ and ‘contesting’ them through littering or devastation (Sendyka 2016b, 700). In Arnold’s Neighbours (2001), a Polish villager shows us a grassy area where Jewish people were beaten to death by Poles; the site is now an unofficial rubbish dump. In Birthplace, too, rusted vehicles lie next to the former dugout where Grynberg’s relatives were killed by a German grenade. As I will argue in Chap. 6, the entire village in It Looks Pretty is simultaneously a landscape of torture and death, and an extensive waste ground. The dumping of rubbish onto such sites associates excluded and murdered people with unwanted, broken objects (Sendyka 2017, 99). Particularly in relation to spaces that retain human remains, Holocaust scholars have been drawing on taphonomy, biology, and soil sciences to challenge the framing of burial sites as ‘voided’ and inert. Ewa Domańska, for example, has recently developed an ‘ecological-necrological’ approach to post-genocide burial sites to consider how the human body’s organic process of decay transforms ecosystems (2019, 1). She describes how the chemical and physical composition of soil changes with the presence of human remains, and vegetation growing on the site transforms as plant biodiversity is affected (2019, 2). Some of these ecological transformations are visible to the naked eye; indeed, one finds that it is through these changes that local populations ‘read’ the spaces as sites of burial in what Czapliński calls a ‘bio-semiotic’ communication (2017b). As I explained in Chap. 1, I use the term ‘posthumous ecology’ to consider the network that extends between the material transformations at sites of burial, the ways in which these changes are read and narrativised by people, and the cinematic framings of these processes. Abram Grynberg’s burial site exemplifies such a network. According to Henryk Grynberg, a farmer explained to him that ‘from the stories’ that were circulated about Abram’s burial, the gravesite was ‘more or less here where this little hill is […] before you could tell, because this green grass grew there […] greener, it stood out’ (Grynberg 1993a, 69). This positioning of the natural environment as ‘readable’ is prevalent in recent reconceptualisations of material witnessing. In Holocaust and genocide studies, the ‘era of the witness’ (Wieviorka 2006), which prioritised testimony, is broadly understood to be waning with the gradual

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passing away of survivors. In what has been termed a ‘post-witness’ (Popescu and Schult 2015) or ‘post-testimonial’ era Holocaust sites have been reframed as repositories of material evidence rather than primarily as spaces of testimony (Dziuban 2017, 18).19 Such an idea has often been expressed in metaphorical or figurative language: Didi-Huberman, for example, writes of looking at the trees at Birkenau ‘as one interrogates silent witnesses’ (2017, 119). Approaches informed by the sciences and by a broadly post-human approach to material agency are pushing these ideas beyond metaphor by considering, for example, how soil or trees can attest to an event regardless of whether or not they have intention (Małczyński 2018).20 Domańska notes that forensic botany configures plants as ‘eco-­ witnesses’ that provide ‘material evidence’ by indicating, for example, how long a body has been buried (2019, 3).21 The possibilities of material ‘witnessing’ take on additional significance in view of the Nazi intention to leave no witnesses to their mass killings. It adds a new perspective to the ways in which the Holocaust has been articulated as an ‘event without a witness’ as formulated by scholars working with psychoanalysis and trauma theory (Laub 1992, 75).22 In the Polish context, it seems significant that just at the point where Polish ‘witnessing’ is becoming more fiercely interrogated, scholars have considered how the natural environment might ‘witness’ instead. The possibility that organic and non-human life could bear witness to events resonates powerfully in situations where human testimonies are difficult to extract, or are subject to distortions and undermined by complicity. Dziuban emphasises, however, that the shift from testimony to materiality does not necessarily ‘result in a complete replacement of one paradigm by the other’, but instead initiates ‘new tensions and interconnections between’ them (2017, 26). As Prager notes, human remains and other organic materials are themselves mute, and must enter into relationships with human figures who ‘read’, interpret, and narrativise them (Prager 2015, 61). It is also possible, however, that human remains and elements of the environment might remain mute. Sendyka has pointed out that if the environment can be constructed as a ‘witness’, it might also be seen as a kind of ‘bystander’: uncommunicative and difficult to read, ‘exist[ing] only for itself—separate, unfavourable’ to the humans who attempt to make meaning from it (Sendyka 2014).

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The Work of Soil Much of the scholarship that reframes the natural environment as a ‘witness’ has developed in parallel with posthuman approaches that consider the ways in which matter has agency, vitality, and force. For Jane Bennett, material elements have the capacity ‘not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own’ (Bennett 2010, viii). Given the kinds of environments that I explore in this book, it seems particularly apt that soil and earth have repeatedly been framed as pulsating with an organic agency. Ladelle McWhorter has described how dirt acts as an intricate organism: ‘it creates a complex water and air filtration system the rhythms of which both help to create more dirt from exposed stone and also to support the microscopic life necessary for turning dead organic matter back into dirt’ (cited by Alaimo 2008, 247). Stacy Alaimo has referred to such material systems as a ‘trans-corporeality’ (2008, 238). In Donna Haraway’s work, which exemplifies some of these patterns of thought, human exceptionalism is confounded as the human, non-human animal and environment are enmeshed. Haraway celebrates our ability to ‘become-with’ the earth and its ‘critters’ as a way of generating new cross-­ species relations on a planet marked by environmental destruction (wrought by humans) (2016, 97). Haraway reminds us that ultimately we are all ‘compost’, and, after death, merge with other organic life in a ‘sympoietic tangling’ (2016, 97). Domańska has recently drawn on Haraway’s work to think specifically about the presence of human remains in post-genocide spaces. She discusses two ways of thinking about ‘dehumanisation’. The first, more conventional use of the term relates to the ethical and practical implications of how violence against people—in life and after death—might be seen as a process of degradation, as the social and political agency of a person is taken away. However, the body comes to have a different kind of agency after death. As our organic material interacts with soil through decomposition, we unbecome human to become ‘humus’ (2019, 3, 10). Here, dehumanisation does not entail ‘exclusion from the dominant (oppressive) community of human beings’ but rather ‘inclusion in a broader collective’ of material forms (2019, 12). Domańska thus advocates for an end to exhumations, allowing bodies to become ‘humus’ in peace and avoiding the political instrumentalisation that often comes with removing and reburying bodies.

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Domańska is aware of the potentially controversial nature of these ideas. Although she references Haraway’s notion of becoming-compost, she recognises that it has a grim legacy, making reference to the ways in which human ashes and bone were used as fertiliser at some Nazi death camps. I have already mentioned the fields of cabbage fertilised by human matter in Night and Fog. One can also find distressing echoes of this in Polish ‘nonsites’. To return to the example of Abram Grynberg, villagers recognised that the more buoyant grass marked his gravesite, but nevertheless used this area as a pasture: ‘When Słowik grazed his cows, he would say that Abram is buried here’ (1993a,  69). The grass that grew from the rich matrix of soil and decomposing matter was consumed by the cows whose milk was then consumed by the villagers, some of whom benefitted from Abram’s murder and kept silent about the crime. Janicka (2018, 47) draws attention to a number of other examples: milk cows have been filmed grazing around the site of the mass grave in Jedwabne, and locals made and sold soup from the ‘tasty’ weeds growing on the site of the old Jewish cemetery. ‘Wheat, Jewish corpses and ashes, milk, bread, matzeva, potatoes’, writes Janicka, are all in the ‘same field’, literally and figuratively (2018, 47). In these examples, the human body becomes humus or compost in practice, but they also indicate the challenges of utilising such an idea and raise questions about the use-value of a body in a community that might have been complicit in violence. In these particular visions of trans-­ corporeality, the local population continues to profit from the dead Jewish body. Power relations are thus re-inscribed as the body’s material, organic agency is co-opted.

Posthumous Archaeologies In some of the reframings of landscape mentioned above, the decomposition of Jewish human remains is seen to help produce the landscapes that serve the cultural imaginary and physical well-being of non-Jewish Poles. While the films I discuss explore this in several ways, they do not dwell on the use-value of decomposing human matter. The dialogue concerning the cows grazing on Grynberg’s grave did not make it into the final cut of Birthplace. Instead, the films tend to resist the idea that the human becomes ‘mere’ matter and dissolves into the environment. This is hardly surprising; alongside death itself, there is something about the ‘process of [the body’s] putrefaction’, the way that it actively transforms after death, that many consider unspeakable (Brinkema 2014, 170).

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One of the responses to the distressing productivity of soil and organic remains involves yet another reframing of our understanding of materiality. I find a suggestion of such an attempt in Didi-Huberman’s afore-­ mentioned response to the flowers growing on the cremation pits at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He looks upon the ‘work’ of soil with a ‘heavy heart’ (2017, 100). Didi-Huberman doesn’t dwell on this disturbing activity, but rather formulates ideas about the natural environment that take us away from it. For example, he rips off a section of bark from a nearby tree and attempts to ‘read’ it like a text (2017, 5). His photograph of the bark shows it laid out like a scroll that one might imagine reading from left to right. There are echoes here of how bio-indicators at decomposition sites are ‘read’ to discern the presence of remains. However, while Didi-­ Huberman posits a ‘reading’ of plant life that removes us from the trans-­ corporeal relations of human remains and soil, the bark is hardly a conventional ‘text’. It is ‘unwritten’: ‘this unwritten thing I attempt to read’ (2017, 5). In his work, then, there are a series of turnings towards and away from materialities: tree bark is something that one might imagine reading, but also something that doesn’t communicate in the language we are used to decoding. Didi-Huberman formulates what he calls an ‘archaeological point of view’ towards post-genocide sites, which also allows him to move away from the work of organic decomposition visibilised in plant life on the earth’s surface (2017, 66). Standing at the cremation pits, he considers how one can imaginatively excavate the space, comparing what has survived in the present ‘with what we know to have disappeared’ (2017, 66). The archaeological point of view refuses the notion that there is ‘nothing’ to see of the past in this space; one can perceive something of the ‘immense human desolation’ in this environment if one looks ‘as an archaeologist looks’ (2017, 66). Instead of thinking about soil as an active agent, earth is conceptualised as an archive or material repository, something that we work on (imaginatively if not physically) not something that works on us. In this way, decomposed organic material might be removed, conceptually, from the immediate material processes of posthumous transformation, such that we might re-assert at least a theoretical grasp over something that has been taken away by both human violence and by ‘nature’. As I will argue in individual analyses of the films, however, this removal is not necessarily complete or convincing, and we are also confronted with disarticulations of human centrality and exceptionalism as posthumous materiality slides back towards the trans-corporeal network in which it has been lodged.

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The deployment of archaeology and excavation as structuring frameworks in which to situate knowledge of the past, and of the self, recurs frequently in philosophy and critical theory. One finds an archaeological imaginary at the foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis, for example, in which ‘understanding the self means uncovering the sedimented strata of [one’s] past’ (Hudson 2017, 64).23 Walter Benjamin, too, traced parallels between memory as a medium of experience and the earth in which past civilisations lie buried, writing: ‘he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging’ and ‘return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth’ (2005, 576). In the field of film-philosophy, Deleuzian approaches to the cinematic image also endow some post-war cinema with an archaeological quality. For Deleuze, particular cinematic spaces, which he termed ‘any-spaces-whatever’, lost their coordinates and homogeneity after WWII, instead opening out to the experience of time (1995, xi).24 In such films, sound and image form layers or ‘strata’, such that ‘the visual image becomes archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic’ (Deleuze 1995, 234). As examples, Deleuze cites the ‘deserts’ of Pasolini’s films which ‘reveal an interminable history beneath our own’ (1995, 234), and the ‘empty and lacunary stratigraphic landscapes of Straub […] where the earth stands for what is buried in it’ (1995, 234–235). History, then, ‘is inseparable from the earth […] and, if we want to grasp an event we must not show it, we must not pass along the event, but plunge into it, go through all the geological layers that are its internal history’ (1995, 244). Deleuze argues that cinema’s archaeological or stratigraphic images are ‘read’ at the same time as they are seen. This reading is not one of attributing fixed meaning, but one which requires a ‘considerable effort of memory and imagination’ (Noël Burch cited by Deleuze 1995, 235). As Rodowick explains, the image must be read because it does not simply show or equate visibility with knowledge, and we must read the relation between past and present (1997, 148). Thus ‘the ambiguous landscapes’ produce ‘a whole “coalescence” of the perceived with the remembered, the imagined, the known’ (Deleuze 1995, 235). This process of reading stratigraphic images is not unlike Didi-Huberman’s assumption of an ‘archaeological point of view’ in post-genocidal spaces. His stance also conjoins perception, knowledge and imagination to move through the ‘layers of time’ that present themselves at the site of the crematorium (2017, 112). I will return to these questions of ‘reading’ stratigraphic landscapes in Chap. 3, which partly draws on Deleuzian frameworks,

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including work by Laura Marks. In Marks’s formulation of an archaeological model of cultural memory, cinema might be able to ‘sort through the rubble created by cultural dislocation and read significance in what official history overlooks’ (2000, 28). Confronted with silences and absences in history and memory, cinema can perform ‘an excavation of the available sources of recorded history and memory’. In her use of a ‘geological/ archaeological metaphor for these historical searchings’, she asks us to keep in mind a mental diagram of sedimented layers (2000, 28). For cultural geographer John Wylie, however, the ‘faith’ in ‘bringing to light’ or ‘making visible’ that inheres in the archaeological metaphor is misplaced (2009, 279). It elides, he argues, the ways in which landscape might be constituted by ‘ineradicable figures of absence, distance and non-coincidence’ (2009, 279). Wylie’s caution is relevant for both figurative and literal excavations, and in my analyses of Birthplace, Ida and Aftermath, I will demonstrate how their archaeological processes shift our understanding of what constitutes ‘presence’ and ‘absence’. In the posthumous ecologies of these films, what is excavated becomes entangled with systems of meaning and interpretation. For example, the breaking open of the ground in Birthplace is paralleled with the emergence of Grynberg’s and the villagers’ recollections; the Polish perpetrator in Ida delivers his confession from within the hole in the ground that until recently held the remains of his victims; in Aftermath, the brothers pray as they remove the bones from the earth, and the film’s only ‘true’ witness gives her testimony in front of the pile of exhumed remains (Fig. 2.3). At the same time, processes of excavation are fraught and tentative,

Fig. 2.3  Aftermath’s witness testifies before exhumed human remains

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suggestive of what cannot be brought back, which is cinematically rendered in disjunctions and ellipses. The scholarship that utilises archaeology as metaphor reverberates with the archaeological turn in Holocaust and genocide studies, that is, the increased interest in using the tools of archaeology to excavate post-­ genocide sites (Prager 2015, 61).25 Entwined with this has been a ‘forensic turn’, a deployment of forensic methods and aesthetics in ‘practical, academic and artistic engagements with mass political violence’ (Dziuban 2017, 7).26 Certain elements of the films under discussion in this book intersect with the turn towards forensics, while diverging in other aspects. If forensics implies official investigations of crime scenes and scientific analysis of evidence, with a view to bringing perpetrators to justice through the legal system, then it is difficult to find a consistently ‘forensic’ imagination in the films that take up the issue of Polish perpetration. In these films, scientific and judicial elements are largely absent: there are no labs or court scenes, no forensic examination of evidence, and no one is brought to trial. In some ways, these absences echo the ways in which a public discourse around Jedwabne and other such crimes has taken shape. Forensic examinations of burial and killing sites have been limited. No one has been brought to justice for crimes like Jedwabne in the present day. The investigations staged in Birthplace, Ida and Aftermath are amateur ones, in which characters, documentary subjects and filmmakers attempt to unveil the truth of a past crime by interrogating witnesses, bystanders, and perpetrators, locating bodies, and exhuming remains. Indeed, the films suggest that such investigations can only be carried out without, and/or contra to, the scientific and judiciary resources of state or official organisations, and without the expectation of prosecuting perpetrators or complicit bystanders. These processes take place unofficially, clandestinely, and through cinema.

Bystander Cinema and the ‘Gaze of the Neighbour’ In the closing section of this chapter, I return to questions of visibility, focusing specifically on the reformulations of looking that are suggested by the reframing of the Polish ‘bystander’. In Chap. 1, I noted that the treasured position of the Polish witness, with its moral implications, suggestions of enforced passivity and distance (and, at worst, ‘indifference’), has been interrogated in recent scholarship. As Fulbrook argues (2019, 19), we need a more ‘differentiated spectrum’ to account for the range of bystanding behaviours in any unfolding situation of violence. Those who

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‘only’ looked at physical violence may have been complicit in crimes against Jewish people in other ways, for example, by reaping material benefits from Jewish murders or keeping silent about Polish perpetration for decades afterwards. In much recent scholarship on bystanding, the act of looking itself has lost its associations with neutrality, passivity, and distance. As Sendyka has pointed out, however, historical studies of bystander behaviour have not often been put into dialogue with the rich body of work on looking that can be found in studies of visual culture.27 Such work can highlight how looking emerges from specific historical, social, political and embodied contexts involving networks of power (Sendyka 2019, 54). This seems particularly important when considering the relationships between Polish bystanders and/or perpetrators, and Jewish people in hiding.28 Grynberg’s wartime memoirs, for example, constantly make reference to Poles watching and actively seeking out opportunities to blackmail or denounce Jewish people (Zawadzka 2018, 311). Whereas in Polish discourse looking is associated with ‘witnessing’, in Grynberg’s recollections Polish looking is an act of ‘finding and trapping victims’. Thus ‘Polish looking’, writes Zawadzka, ‘is very dangerous’ (2018, 312). In the testimonies of Jewish Poles who ‘passed’ as Catholic Poles, there are numerous references to the vigilance that was needed in front of a continual surveillance (Zawadzka 2018, 344). Janicka has likened this omnipresent Polish gaze to Foucault’s discussion of the panopticon; the Polish gaze, spread across many faces, is one that exerted a form of social control over Jewish people (2014/2015, 163). The idea of fashioning oneself for an invisible gaze also has Lacanian echoes: ‘I see only from one point’, Lacan writes, ‘but in my existence I am looked at from all sides’ (Lacan 1986, 72). The concept of anamorphosis helped Lacan to formulate the ways in which we feel ourselves being looked at ‘without seeing the other’s eyes’ (Lukacher cited by Kear 1999, 181). The anamorphic skull, Jay explains, is the ‘gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function’ (1993, 363). While I do not, in this book, ground my analysis of spectatorship in Lacanian theory per se, I want to take forward this particular vision of anamorphosis to consider how postJedwabne cinema might visibilise looking as a complex network. The films under discussion in this book suggest the ways in which Jewish victims, ‘symbolic Jews’, and Poles who assist Jewish people or discuss past crimes feel themselves to be under the threat of some kind of exposure, and must continually fashion themselves accordingly. The films draw attention to the gaze of Polish neighbours, which at times is cast by specific individuals, and at other points seems to hang over the characters like an invisible weight of

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interminable surveillance: a more abstract, but no less threatening, ‘gaze of the neighbour’. Looking and acting are closely connected, while violence draws more and more people to watch its unfolding. In Birthplace, Aftermath, and It Looks Pretty, crowds assemble to watch the consequences of violent actions, as human remains are exhumed or displayed, and fire consumes properties and looted possessions. Watching, collectively or individually, becomes associated within the films with ethically dubious actions at best, and lethal physical violence at worst. By not visibilising the historical murders of Jewish people, the films give space to these networks of looking. The camera is trained not onto Jewish death, but onto those who would have watched it as a spectacle; those who once held the power of the gaze are now themselves subject to scrutiny. A number of questions are raised by this. As cinematic spectators watch this watching, how might our understanding of our own acts of viewing be reframed? It is worth noting that the position of the witness has been valorised not just in Polish discourse but also in international Holocaust films, which tend to inscribe viewers into a ‘community of sympathizing witnesses’, to use Janicka and Żukowski’s description (2016, 109). Secondary and mediated acts of witnessing are also frequently deployed in Holocaust visual art, as scholarship on ‘postmemory’ has emphasised (see Hirsch 2012). What happens, then, when the idea of the ‘witness’ begins to crumble, and looking becomes exposed as dangerous (perhaps to ourselves, but more so to others)? There is no simple answer to this question that all of the films adhere to, though a number of possibilities can be signalled. When acts of killing during the Holocaust are not shown on film, our looking is no longer that of the moral and responsible ‘witness’ to Holocaust violence. This is not to say, of course, that we do not see other forms of suffering in its aftermath: the grief of Grynberg in Birthplace and Wanda in Ida, and the violence inflicted on the Kalina brothers in Aftermath and on Paweł in It Looks Pretty are all examples of such suffering. Often, however, the films seem to frame our viewing as though we were watching alongside diegetic bystanders. In Birthplace, Grynberg is watched by villagers who gather at the corners of the frame, but also by the camera that captures him, exposed and alone, from some distance. In Aftermath, the film at times frames our vision as though placing us in the position of someone stalking the Kalina brothers, so that ‘our’ look is implicated in the threatening looks onto the protagonists (Żukowski 2017, 341) (Fig. 2.4). In It Looks Pretty, the camera situates us amongst, and brings us distressingly close to, the villagers who are burning Paweł’s possessions (Fig. 2.5).

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Fig. 2.4  Franek seen through the trees of the forest in Aftermath

Fig. 2.5  Watching the bonfire with It Looks Pretty’s villagers

In such moments, we seem to join a collective of complicit bystanders and perpetrators. Potentially, however, this might make it possible to start thinking self-reflexively about processes of viewing, and individual chapters will offer other possibilities that might emerge from these networks of looking. As numerous studies of spectatorship have stressed, cinematic self-reflexivity can be evoked through explicit thematisations of voyeurism; as films emphasise processes of looking, the illusion of neutral, distanced observation might be undermined (Aaron 2007, 93, 97). Cinematic

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self-reflexivity does not, of course, guarantee that viewers suddenly develop a radical political or ethical awareness, ‘as if everything self-reflexive is also progressive’ (Cowie 1997, 292). Highlighting how visual images are produced only has the potential to confront or implicate us. In the films analysed here, viewers watch diegetic bystanders but also seem to stand with them; in this way, our own comfortable positions as neutral and distanced spectators may be disturbed, and the neutrality of our looking questioned. At times, images or objects are framed in such a way that they seem to ‘look back’ at us, which might make us momentarily aware of our own viewing. Once again, the structure of anamorphosis is instructive here. The ‘conventional perspectival image’ onto The Ambassadors, suggesting to the viewer that everything ‘radiate[s] outward from our look’, also describes, in part, the position of the bystander who might look at Jewish suffering and death with impunity (Silverman 1996, 176). By addressing us from within, the films potentially disrupt this structure. Individual analyses of the films will be attentive to moments when viewers are encouraged to think about how as well as what they see, a process that occurs as much through framing as through a thematisation of looking as an activity embedded in structures of power, domination and violence. We don’t simply occupy a single ‘position’ across these films, however: they move us through a number of dynamically changing frames and views. Our looking and its implications (including ethical implications) change from moment to moment, and film to film. These shifts in fact recall the scholarship on bystanding as dynamic. As Sendyka has argued, bystanding is a ‘time-­ bound’, fluid process (2019, 66). To speak of a single stable ‘figure’ of a bystander might be as inadequate and misleading as it is to think of a single ‘position’ of film viewing. As regards both bystanding and film spectating, we should consider instead the ‘interpersonal, cross-linked, dynamic, unstable exchanges of multiplying, fleeting, uncoordinated and intersecting scopic acts’ (2019, 67). I hope that a close reading of the films in individual chapters will draw some of these out.

Notes 1. The gaze is identified in Lacanian discourse with the objet petit a, the ‘missing object that will seemingly satisfy the desire for plenitude’ (Jay 1993, 361). Scott has argued that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to extract a consistent theory of the gaze from Lacan’s writing on vision; the gaze ‘resists understanding as defiantly as Holbein’s death’s head resists perception when viewed from the front’ (2008, 3).

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2. My italics. 3. Dziuban makes a similar argument about Janicka’s The Odd Place, a collection of photographs taken of skies over concentration and death camps. Dziuban argues that Janicka’s work shifts emphasis from questions of representation and their limits to ‘the problem’ of ‘frames’ (2014a, 38). 4. See, for example, Skibińska (2011) and Tokarska-Bakir (2019) for an account of some of these trials. 5. Dobrosielski has argued that Jedwabne is sometimes discussed as a ‘black hole’ into which our critical thinking vanishes (2017, 370). 6. LaCapra specifically mentions Lyotard, Felman, and Lanzmann as amongst those who formulate such a ‘hyperbolic appeal to the sublime and the unrepresentable’ (2001, 93). 7. Levinas’s critique of ontology and being was formulated partly in refutation of Heidegger whose associations with Nazism appalled him. 8. Zylinska draws on Hannah Arendt here. She writes further that the ‘revelation’ of Jedwabne ‘exposes some of the mechanisms involved in the production of the idea of national unity which has to bar, exclude and annihilate any forms of alterity that threaten it’ (2005, 111). 9. For Derrida, a crucial element of Levinasian thought was the notion of hospitality or welcome of the other (1999). See Saxton (Downing and Saxton 2010, 107–111) for a discussion of the overlaps and disjunctions between Levinasian and Derridean ethics in the context of cinema. 10. As Dillon also explains, Derridean deconstruction partakes of a ‘spectral’ logic, insofar as it stresses ‘the non-contemporaneity of the present with itself and the open possibility of the phantasmatic return of the past and arrival of the future’ (2018, 27). 11. Davis notes, however, that Derrida has been criticized for simplifying Lacan (2010, 115). 12. As Dillon points out, Derrida never developed a rigorous theoretical approach to film, and his writing about cinema is ‘subjunctive’, characterized by the statement that if he ‘were to write about film’ he would be most interested in cinema as a ‘mode and system of belief’. Despite this, his writing has inspired a significant body of theoretical work on the cinema (2018, 25). 13. I refer here to Bataille’s text ‘The Language of Flowers’, originally published in 1929 (Bataille 1985, 10–14). 14. Mbembe is writing about human remains displayed at genocide memorial sites in Rwanda. 15. See Kaczmarek for further discussion of the forest in Polish literature and visual culture (2017, 222–225). 16. Gross’s interpretation of the photograph has been contested, with some claiming that it shows Poles sent to clean up the grounds of the former camp. See Krzywiec for a summary of the controversy around the photograph (2013). See Dziuban (2015) for a discussion of Golden Harvest and the practice of plundering former Nazi German concentration camps.

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17. For further analysis of this image see Kaczmarek (2017, 230) and Janicka (2018, 7). 18. The album was published in 2012; some of the photographs were presented earlier in a series of exhibitions, also entitled Matzevot for Everyday Use, including in Warsaw in 2010. 19. This has recently been suggested by work on the ‘scrolls of Auschwitz’, documents written by members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-­ Birkenau and then, as Didi-Huberman writes, buried on the site in the hope that ‘one day the earth itself could bear witness, archeologically, to what had happened’ (2008, 110). Chare and Williams, too, emphasize the materiality of these documents and their ability to act as a ‘mute witness’ (2016, 45). See Chulphongsathorn’s discussion of this (2017, 127–131). 20. See also Chulphongsathorn’s approach to the forest as an archive that records events that have occurred in it, which he reads partly through an analysis of Shoah (2017, 121). 21. Not all approaches to non-human witnessing draw on the sciences. Clark, for example, argues that there has always been something ‘inhuman’ at the heart of key theoretical approaches to witnessing and testimony, including in the writing of Lyotard and Derrida. Lyotard’s argument that something always ‘remains to be phrased’ about the Holocaust situates an unrecovered ‘remainder’ at the centre of testimony which cannot be made ‘an object of knowledge’ (2015, 166–167). Clark’s particular focus is the possibility that animals, ‘paradigmatic victim[s] of being silenced and unheard’, can witness (2015, 167). If witnessing ‘appeals to forms of attestation that are irreducible to the psychic, intentional, conscious or experiential’ then ‘witnessing is irreducible to the human’ (2015, 168, 169). 22. See also Felman (1992), who is unlikely to have been convinced by Polish discourses of the traumatised or morally righteous witness. Discussing the representations of Polish villagers in Shoah, she characterizes them as people who ‘see’ but do ‘not quite look, they avoid looking directly, and thus they overlook at once their responsibility and their complicity as witnesses’ (1992, 208). 23. Hudson also notes the connections between archaeology and haunting, pointing to Freud’s analysis of the spectres at Pompeii in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. Freud’s gloss on this text, Hudson notes, gave rise to the ‘archaeological metaphors of psychoanalysis’ (2017, 63). 24. As Martin-Jones has argued, the way in which WWII has been isolated by Deleuze as the ‘point around which cinema is transformed’ is problematic in the wider context of world cinema; different ‘moments of crisis’ take place at different historical junctures (2011, 12). Birthplace, which I analyse in part through a Deleuzian lens, emerged soon after a particularly pivotal moment in Poland: the fall of state socialism, and the easing of a number of restrictions on representation.

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25. Prominent in this field has been the work of Caroline Sturdy Colls, who has led excavations at a number of well-known sites like Treblinka, but has also worked at unmarked ‘non-sites’ deploying non-invasive forensic methods. Such methods do not disturb the resting place of the dead and thus adhere to the prohibition against exhumation in Jewish religious law. See Sturdy Colls (2015). The prohibition has been variously interpreted and applied. Domańska (2019, 6) states that ‘there is no single Jewish stance on exhumations of Nazi-era mass graves’. Some religious leaders consider it obligatory to exhume and reinter someone who has been buried in a mass grave or in ‘non-consecrated or gentile cemeteries’ (Domańska 2019, 6, citing Rabbi Joseph A. Polak). 26. These turns have raised concerns that material evidence, popularly understood as providing scientific proof and unambiguous accounts of the past, can be easily instrumentalised. The investigations into Jedwabne provide an example of this. The Institute of National Remembrance opened the top layer of two of the graves so as to examine the human remains on site, but objections from Jewish religious groups meant that no further excavations were performed, and the remains were not analysed in labs (Dziuban 2017, 24). As Dziuban explains, right-wing activists have exploited this situation to argue that there is no evidence that Poles were responsible for the crimes. For Dziuban, this situation exposes the ways in which an ‘uncritical reliance on the truth regime of forensics’ can be manipulated to support ‘revisionist historical claims’ (2017, 25). 27. There are, of course, exceptions to this, including, in the Polish context, the work of Niziołek, who has examined post-war Holocaust theatre as a space that cultivated identifications with the Polish ‘bystander’ (2019, 252). 28. As Niziołek reminds us, Hilberg’s original triad of (German) perpetrators, (local) witnesses or bystanders and (Jewish) victims is related to the phenomenology of the spectacle, where Jewish victims were always exposed or felt themselves to be exposed. Perpetrators wielded the power of looking while camouflaging their crimes (2019, 22).

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———. 2015. The Politics of Human Remains at the ‘Peripheries of the Holocaust’. Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 29: 154–172. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/23256249.2015.1106133. ———. 2017. Introduction. Forensics in the Expanded Field. In Mapping the ‘Forensic Turn’: Engagements with Materialities of Mass Death in Holocaust Studies and Beyond, ed. Zuzanna Dziuban, 7–35. Vienna: New Academic Press. ———. 2019a. Introduction: Haunting in the Land of the Untraumatised. In The Spectral Turn: Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire, ed. Zuzanna Dziuban, 7–47. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Felman, Shoshana. 1992. The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 204–283. New York and London: Routledge. Fowler, Catherine. 2017. Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with Georges Didi-Huberman. In Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, ed. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit, 241–254. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fulbrook, Mary. 2019. Bystanders: Catchall Concept, Alluring Alibi, or Crucial Clue? In Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, ed. Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs, 15–35. New  York and Oxford: Berghahn. Gross, Jan T. 2003. Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941. London: Arrow Books. Gross, Jan T., with Irena Grudzińska-Gross. 2012. Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grynberg, Henryk. 1993a. Dziedzictwo. London: Aneks. Guturow, Jacek, Jerzy Jarniewicz, and David Kennedy. 2010. Beyond Trauma: The Uses of the Past in Twenty-First Century Europe. European Journal of English Studies 14 (1): 1–9. Hand, Seán. 2009. Emmanuel Levinas. London and New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoffman, Eva. 2005. After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust. London: Vintage. Hudson, Martyn. 2017. Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory. London and New York: Routledge. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. 2013. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Janicka, Elz˙bieta. 2014/2015. Pamięć przyswojona. Koncepcja polskiego doświadczenia zagłady Żydów jako traumy zbiorowej w świetle rewizji kategorii świadka. Studia Litteraria et Historica 3 (4): 148–227.

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———. 2018. Corpus Christi, corpus delicti—nowy kontrakt narracyjny. Pokłosie (2012) Władysława Pasikowskiego wobec kompromitacji kategorii polskiego świadka Zagłady. Studia Litteraria et Historica 7: 1–93. Janicka, Elz˙bieta, and Tomasz Żukowski. 2016. Philo-Semitic Violence? New Polish Narrative About Jews After 2000. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN Wydawnictwo. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kaczmarek, Olga. 2017. Las. In Ślady Holokaustu w Imaginarium Kultury Polskiej, ed. Justyna Kowalska-Leder, Paweł Dobrosielski, Iwona Kurz, and Małgorzata Szpakowska, 219–244. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej. Kear, Adrian. 1999. Diana Between Two Deaths: Spectral Ethics and the Time of Mourning. In Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief, ed. Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, 169–186. New York: Routledge. Kenaan, Hagi. 2013. The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Krzywiec, Grzegorz. 2013. Golden Harvest or Hearts of Gold? Studies on the Wartime Fates of Poles and Jews, edited by Marek J. Chodakiewicz, Wojciech J.  Muszyński, Paweł Styrna. In Holocaust Studies and Materials, ed. Jan Grabowski and Dariusz Libionka, 565–578. Warsaw: Pracownia Wydawnicza Andrzej Zabrowarny. Lacan, Jacques. 1986. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Lankosz, Borys. 2015. Grain of Truth/Ziarno Prawdy. Poland. Lanzmann, Claude. 1985. Shoah. France/UK. Laub, Dori. 1992. An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival. In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 75–92. New York and London: Routledge. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. Trans Michael B. Smith. London: The Athlone Press. Łoziński, Paweł. 1992. Birthplace/Miejsce Urodzenia. Poland. Łysak, Tomasz. 2011. Jedwabne twarza ̨ w twarz: Sa ̨siedzi Agnieszki Arnold i Jana Tomasza Grossa. In Pamięć Shoah: Kulturowe Reprezentacje i Praktyki Upamiętnienia, ed. Tomasz Majewski and Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska, 2nd ed., 891–900. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Officyna.

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Małczyński, Jacek. 2018. Jak drzewa świadcza ̨? W stronę nie-ludzkich figuracji świadka [How Do Trees Testify? Towards Non-human Witness Figurations]. Teksty Drugie 3: 373–385. https://doi.org/10.18318/td.2018.3.26. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Durham: Duke University Press. Martin-Jones, David. 2011. Deleuze and World Cinemas. London and New York: Continuum. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. McMahon, Laura. 2012. Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis. London: LEGENDA Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. McMullen, Ken. 1983. Ghost Dance. West Germany/UK. Mitchell, Don. 1996. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Introduction. In Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, 2–8. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morag, Raya. 2013. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London and NY: I.B.Tauris. Mroz, Matilda. 2012. Temporality and Film Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2014. The Aesthetics of Overflow: Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia in Bergsonian Duration. In Into the Blue: The Cinema of the Swimming Pool, ed. Pam Hirsch and Christopher Brown, 169–180. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. ———. 2015. Performing Evolution: Immersion, Unfolding, and Lucille Hadžihalilović’s Innocence. In Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, 287–298. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Niziołek, Grzegorz. 2019. The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust. Trans. U. Phillips. London and New York: Methuen Drama. Pasikowski, Władysław. 2012. Pokłosie/Aftermath. Poland/Russia/Netherlands. Pawlikowski, Paweł. 2013. Ida. Poland/Denmark/France/UK. Popescu, Diana I., and Tanja Schult. 2015. Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Prager, Brad. 2015. The Act of Digging: Archaeology, Photography and Forensics in Birthplace and Holocaust by Bullets. In Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images and the Ethics of Representation, ed. Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer, 59–75. New York and Chichester: Wallflower Press. Resnais, Alain. 1955. Night and Fog. France. Rodowick, D.N. 1997. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rose, Gillian. 1996. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sadowska, Małgorzata. 2012b. Z bliska widok jest brzydki. Polskie filmy o Żydach. Newsweek, 28 May. Accessed 29 April 2020. https://www.newsweek.pl/filmyo-zydach-z-bliska-widok-jest-brzydki/tvyq8fm.

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Saghafi, Kas. 2010. Apparitions—Of Derrida’s Other. New  York: Fordham University Press. Sasnal, Wilhelm, and Anka Sasnal. 2011. Z Daleka Widok Jest Piękny/It Looks Pretty From A Distance. Poland. Saxton, Libby. 2007. Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann. Film-Philosophy 11 (2): 1–14. Scott, Maria. 2008. Lacan’s “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a” as Anamorphic Discourse. Paragraph 31 (3): 327–343. Sendyka, Roma. 2014. A Journey, the Pain of Others, and Historical Experience: Susan Silas. RIHA Journal  1 (12), Special Issue ‘Contemporary Art and Memory’. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://www.riha-journal.org/ articles/2014/2014-oct-dec/special-issue-contemporary-art-and-memorypart-1/sendyka-susan-silas-en. ———. 2016b. Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-sites of Memory. East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 30 (4): 687–702. https://doi. org/10.1177/0888325416658950. ———. 2017. Nie-miejsca pamięci i ich nie-ludzkie pomniki. Teksty Drugie 2 (5): 86–108. ———. 2019. Bystanders as Visual Subjects: Onlookers, Spectators, Observers, and Gawkers in Occupied Poland. In Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, ed. Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs, 52–71. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York and London: Routledge. Skibińska, Alina. 2011. Perpetrators’ Self-portrait: The Accused Village Administrators, Commune Heads, Fire Chiefs, Forest Rangers, and Gamekeepers. East European Politics and Societies 25 (3): 457–485. Spargo, R. Clifton. 2006. Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sturdy Colls, Caroline. 2015. Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions. Cham and Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing. Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. 2019. Pogrom Cries—Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946. 2nd rev. ed. Berlin: Peter Lang. Trigg, Dylan. 2012. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: University of Ohio Press. Trotter, David. 2007. Cinema and Modernism. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2010. The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Walden, Victoria. 2019. Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Waligórska, Magdalena. 2013. The Jewish-Theme Whodunnit in Contemporary Poland and Germany. East European Jewish Affairs 43 (2): 143–161.

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Weiner Weber, Suzanne. 2008. The Forest as a Liminal Space: A Transformation of Culture and Norms During the Holocaust. Holocaust Studies 14 (1): 35–60. Wieviorka, Annette. 2006. The Era of the Witness. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Wilson, Emma. 2005. Material Remains: Night and Fog. October 112: 89–110. ———. 2011. Resnais and the Dead. In Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, ed. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, 126–139. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. ———. 2012. Love, Mortality and the Moving Image. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wojcieszek, Przemysław. 2012. Sekret/The Secret. Poland. Wrona, Marcin. 2015. Demon. Poland/Israel. Wylie, John. 2009. Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34: 275–289. Zawadzka, Anna. 2018. Świadkowanie świadkowaniu. Żydowskie narracje o polskich “świadkach” zagłady. In Opowieść o Niewinności. Kategoria Świadka Zagłady w Kulturze Polskiej (1942–2015), ed. Maryla Hopfinger and Tomasz Żukowski, 279–344. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN. Wydawnictwo. Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2006. The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. Narrative Shock and Polish Memory Remaking in the Twenty-First Century. In Memory and Postwar Memorials: Confronting the Violence of the Past, ed. Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan, 95–115. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Żukowski, Tomasz. 2017. Spór o reguły komunikacji. Dyskusja wokół Jedwabnego. In Debaty po Roku 1989: Literatura w Procesach Komunikacji, w Stronę Nowej Syntezy (2), ed. Maryla Hopfinger, Zygmunt Zia ̨tek, and Tomasz Żukowski, 263–344. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN. Wydawnictwo. ———. 2018a. Wielki Retusz: Jak Zapomnieliśmy, że Polacy Zabijali Żydów. Warsaw: Wielka Litera. ———. 2018b. Archeologia nostalgiczna i archeologia krytyczna. In Opowieść o Niewinności. Kategoria Świadka Zagłady w Kulturze Polskiej (1942–2015), ed. Maryla Hopfinger and Tomasz Żukowski, 389–436. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN. Wydawnictwo. Zylinska, Joanna. 2005. The Ethics of Cultural Studies. London and New  York: Continuum. ———. 2007. Who is My Neighbour? Ethics Under Duress. In Imaginary Neighbours: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, ed. Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska, 275–300. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

CHAPTER 3

Posthumous Landscapes and the Earth-­ Archive: Archaeology, Ethics and Birthplace

Towards the end of Łoziński’s 1992 documentary Birthplace, a group of villagers lead Henryk Grynberg to the edge of a field where, they claim, his father Abram had lain dead for a week before being buried in an unmarked grave. In the course of the film, Grynberg has learned that his father was murdered by his Polish Catholic acquaintances, the Wojtyński brothers, who, it is suggested, would rather kill Abram than return the cows they had been keeping for him during the war. In the final scenes of Birthplace, Abram’s remains are unearthed. The archaeological metaphor that has been in operation throughout the film is literalised as the earth becomes framed as a kind of historical archive.1 Drawing on the Deleuzian notion of stratigraphic images, this chapter will consider how the images of Grynberg’s return to his birthplace are layered with his spoken memories in voice-over, becoming strata that the film sifts through. The series of recollections voiced by Polish bystanders concerning the Grynbergs’ suffering during the Holocaust can also be seen as layers that are gradually excavated. In its literal and figurative treatment of archaeology, the surface of the earth and the speaking face become intertwined, as both suggest that ‘behind’ face and sur-face one can find knowledge and meaning. The film’s broadly investigative trajectory, in which landscapes are scoured for remains and people are questioned for what they might reveal, adds to this impression of epistemological progress. If the archaeological metaphor tends to suggest a particular faith in ‘bringing to presence’ (Wylie 2009, 279) however, then Birthplace frequently brings us up against its limits. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Mroz, Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7_3

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The film points towards the failures of memory, the obstructions to understanding, and the muteness of material evidence. Birthplace’s cinematic posthumous ecology positions the surfaces of the face and of the earth as barriers to further enquiry in a climate of continuing silence that conceals the full extent to which the Polish villagers might have benefitted from violence against their Jewish neighbours. Deleuze’s conception of stratigraphic images is informed by a Bergsonian understanding of temporality (in which time splits into the present that passes and the past that is preserved), which differs substantially from that of Levinas. For Levinas, encountering the other creates a rupture of continuity, ‘an ethical rip in the fabric of time’, ushering in an ahistorical sense of alterity (Cooper 2006, 28). Despite their differences, this chapter explores the value of placing Deleuzian and Levinasian thought alongside one another in a kind of archaeological process that preserves their distinct outlines like strata in the earth, rather than attempting to seamlessly combine them.2 Birthplace evokes and performs multiple, and complex, encounters between human subjects that can productively be read through Levinas’s writing on the ethical relation. Levinas’s conceptualisation of the responsibility towards the other evoked in the face-­ to-­face encounter illuminates those moments, recounted in the film, in which the Grynberg family seeking aid during the Holocaust were either admitted or turned away, and sheds light on how ethical relations were strained by fear and perverted by violence. None of these encounters can be directly accessed by viewers of Birthplace. Instead, the chapter draws attention to how the relations between Grynberg, the film crew, and the villagers in the film’s ‘present’ produce and mediate our impression of ethical relations in the past. Viewers’ relationships with these filmed subjects are, to use the words of Downing and Saxton, ‘inevitably manipulated […] rather than unmediated, as in Levinas’s account of the ethical epiphany’ (2010, 92). Nevertheless, ‘viewing is always potentially an ethically charged encounter’ (92). The chapter will consider how Birthplace might encourage an ethical stance towards its filmed subjects, and particularly Grynberg, as the alterity of filmed others is negotiated and their reduction to objects of knowledge disrupted. The analysis of Birthplace in this chapter continually returns to two key elements, which are ideas and visual images at the same time: the face and the home. While the face of the other is the privileged site of the ethical encounter according to Levinas, the vocabulary of ethics frequently makes reference to the home and home-coming. This chapter will explore such

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language insofar as it relates to a mise-en-scene of domestic space in narratives of Holocaust assistance, and specifically those that are recounted and to some extent re-staged in Birthplace. In tracing the vocabulary of the home in this way, the analysis of Birthplace creates a conjunction between ethical philosophy and ideas of the negated home, hostile landscape, and impossible home-coming that frequently recur in Holocaust ‘documentaries of return’ (Insdorf 2003, 300). This chapter will draw out the multiple, indeed often conflicting, ideas related to geographies and physiognomies in Deleuzian and Levinasian thought, aiming to connect these with the particular vision of Polish-Jewish wartime relationships that Birthplace stages.

The Investigation and the Trace Łoziński’s first short film, Journey (Poland, 1991), was adapted from fragments of Grynberg’s autobiographical texts, The Jewish War and The Victory, which recount the experiences of the Grynberg family during and immediately after WWII.  As Żukowski has pointed out, these texts are explicit about the threat that the Polish collective held for Jewish people during the Holocaust (2018a, 61–66). They describe how a number of Poles denounced Grynberg’s family and friends to the Germans, which in some cases led to their deaths. We read of property and goods stolen from Jewish villagers, and the violence inflicted on those who attempted to reclaim them. On his first return to his town after the war, Grynberg describes how former Jewish homes had new Polish tenants who ‘all expressed surprise that we were still alive, to the point that we ourselves began to feel surprise, as if we had lived too long’ (1993b, 66–67). In this ‘mortal economy’, to use Aaron’s term (2014, 186), the unwanted Jewish subjects were framed as the living dead. Łoziński’s experience of working with Grynberg’s writing inspired him to explore Polish-Jewish relations in ways that went beyond the standard characterisations of Catholic Poles as rescuers (Łysak 2017). With the end of censorship in 1989, films treating a wider spectrum of Polish behaviour during the Holocaust were emerging, and public discussion around Polish-Jewish relations was broadening in scope (Łysak 2017).3 While Łoziński wanted to avoid the facile vision of Polish rescuers that dominated Polish culture, he was also wary of moving too far in the other direction and accusing Poles of being co-conspirators in the Holocaust, a ‘damaging simplification’ that he associated with Lanzmann’s Shoah

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(1985) (Łoziński cited by Łysak 2017).4 Łoziński persuaded Grynberg to return to his birthplace from America, where the latter had been living and writing for decades. For several weeks before Grynberg’s arrival Łoziński conducted his own investigations into the Grynberg family’s wartime experience, and thus knew much more than Grynberg himself did throughout the shoot. During filming, Grynberg was placed in front of particular villagers and directed towards asking the questions that Łoziński already suspected would yield the most fruitful responses, while the film crew, to cite Grynberg, ‘waited for my reactions’ (Bielas 1993). Hence Łoziński refers to Grynberg as a ‘medium’ (Bielas 1993), as though Grynberg were an intermediary for the villagers as well as for traces of other, long-silenced, voices.5 Through framing and editing, Birthplace gives the impression that Grynberg is present at each filmed encounter with the village inhabitants. However, this was not necessarily the case; sometimes, he appeared in the middle of an interview or not at all, depending on the frankness, and fear, of the villagers (Bielas 1993). When considering the ethics of Birthplace’s face-to-face encounters, then, it is important to keep in mind how these are produced and mediated on the level of film form; we cannot know how they played out in actuality. Given that Birthplace, in part, attempts to investigate Abram’s death, it is apt that the film has frequently been described using the vocabulary of investigation and detection. Łoziński himself characterises it as a ‘filmic investigation’ (cited by Łysak 2017).6 As Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska has noted, Birthplace has the dramaturgical investigative structure characteristic of a fiction film, as Grynberg follows ‘leads’ in his attempt to discover what happened to his family (2012, 221). To some extent, the film mobilises a dramatic tension that builds slowly and culminates in revelation, confrontation and exhumation (Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska 2012, 63). A rough chronological structure is created by the ordering of the villagers’ memories, which begin by focusing on pre-war Polish-Jewish relations before moving to the wartime years and Abram’s death. And yet, the film ultimately does not quite ‘close’ the investigation: no perpetrator is brought to justice, and much around the circumstances of the deaths of Jewish people in hiding is left unspoken, as are the subsequent material benefits that accrued to the bystanders. Despite some information being revealed and some perpetrators being named (often reluctantly and fearfully), the film shows us how much of the structural elements that allowed the deaths to occur and then to continue unpunished remain intact.

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Birthplace thus ultimately eschews the sense of linear progress that the investigative mode implies. Instead, more cyclical temporal rhythms are evoked. Grynberg noted upon his return that: ‘Time did not stop […] the old met with the new. The new arrived, but the old did not pass’ (Grynberg 1993a, 90).7 The past seems ‘alive’ in the gestures and speech of the villagers, which repeat wartime patterns and habits (Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska 2012, 63). In Levinasian terms, one could argue that, alongside its investigative attempts, the film can be seen as a tracing, an attempt to follow the ‘disappearing traces’ (Glowacka 2012) left by the Jewish residents, and primarily by Grynberg’s father, across a posthumous landscape. Rather than lead us back into the past through an investigative drive, this tracing engenders what Levinas termed the ‘time of the other’, a time that transcends our ordinary conceptions of linearity (Girgus 2010, 56). The trace, as Glowacka explains, allows Levinas to ‘conceive of nonappropriative manifestations of alterity, beyond the totalising grip of representation’ (2012, 136). Following Abram’s traces across the landscapes of his life, suffering and death does not lead to a ‘possession’ of the other, but rather indicates what Drabinski has called ‘the ruining or decomposition’ of the very possibility of possession (2011, 39).

The Negated Home and ‘Anonymous Materiality’ Birthplace opens with an image of a LOT Polish Airlines plane landing at an unnamed airport. The image of the plane emphasises the paradoxical status of the returning Grynberg: he is at once an outsider from elsewhere, who has had to cover a particular spatial distance, and also someone who is returning to the place of his origin, which suggests an intimate relationship to the place returned to. The opening scene points to this duality succinctly, as the film’s title Miejsce Urodzenia (Birthplace), is inscribed across the image of the plane. In subsequent scenes, Grynberg travels across snowy countryside in a vehicle. The film cuts between images of Grynberg looking out the window, and moving images of the landscape. As in many films of return, these scenes of travel along rural roads highlight the distance one must cover in order to engage with the past. This distance is not only spatial but also metaphorical and temporal; his distant memories are difficult to reformulate, and he seems to travel backwards through time in the attempt. The first words spoken in the film attest to this intersection of spatio-temporal movements and traversals of memory,

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as Grynberg begins to narrate his memories in voice-over: ‘I remember a lane leading to the house where we lived…’8 From the very beginning, however, a series of disjunctions operate between sound and image and past and present, and between Grynberg’s body and the landscape. Shots of the road from within the moving vehicle tend to be disconnected from Grynberg’s point-of-view and seeing body, rather than aligned with it. Initially, we do not see the landscape through the foggy window of the van, as he does, but rather straight-on from the front. As he recounts his memories of the village of his childhood and the animals, fields, lanes and houses within it, the film provides us with images of Polish villages in the present day. These images, of course, cannot ‘match up’ to the memories, but they seem chosen to make the disjunction between sound and image most striking. For example, as he recalls the way in which he used to run towards the cows in his childhood, we see empty, frozen fields. Similarly, as he recounts walking hand in hand with his father from one village to the next, we see the solitary figure of Grynberg walking in the snow. These obstinate gaps suggest the impossibility of mapping memory coherently across the landscape. In describing filmic returns to scenes of Holocaust crimes or rescue, Insdorf has noted how the person returns to a place that may ‘no longer know him or her’ (Insdorf 2003, 300). What is striking in this description is the implication that it is ‘place’ itself that may ‘no longer know’ the one who returns and that is imputed to have or to lose memory. In a similar vein, though in a different context, Trigg has described a return to the once-familiar space of home which has, in one’s absence, become an ‘anonymous materiality’, displacing ‘our attempts to imbue [the material] world with value’ (2012, 218). Trigg’s words here encapsulate an issue that is not only central to Birthplace, but also recurs in the other films discussed in this book. Frequently, the once-familiar natural landscape and built environment of one’s home threaten to unravel the human subject who once felt themselves to be central and centered in these spaces. Filmic characters or viewers struggle to reinvest these landscapes with the meaning that they once possessed. The winteriness of Birthplace’s landscape is particularly resonant when considering Grynberg’s difficult, or impossible, home-coming. In Bachelard’s writing on the cultural and theoretical ‘diagrams’ of home, winter landscapes increase the feeling of intimacy and safety in domestic interiors (1994, 38). The ‘winter cosmos’ that reigns outside can be construed as a particularly emphatic ‘non-house’ (1994, 40–41). For this reason, as Trigg points out, ‘home—homecoming—is best

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suited to the winter months’, when the intimacy of the home counteracts the feeling of nullification that winter whiteness can bring (2012, 220). In Birthplace, however, Grynberg is continually shown traversing snowy roads, icy paths, and frosty fields; he finds himself irrevocably in the space of the ‘non-house’. The difficult homecoming of Jewish returnees staged in Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) is traced across a similarly frozen environment. Before the film shows us any encounters between Grynberg and the villagers, the film presents a series of brief shots of farm animals. The frequency with which animal imagery is encountered in Holocaust discourse should encourage us to explore these shots further. Testimonies of Holocaust survivors frequently draw on animal metaphors to express a feeling of helplessness while hiding from persecution (Cobel-Tokarska 2018, 166). One finds such formulations in Grynberg’s own recollections. In The Jewish War, he considers how the ‘villains’ who searched for people hiding in forests identified Jewish people with animals: ‘for them the word “forest” was always associated with loot, stolen timber, and animals. And in the forest people and animals look and act alike’ (1993b, 45). When reflecting on the importance of finding his father’s remains, Grynberg (1993a, 89) writes that he wanted to bury Abram ‘like a human being. Restoring his place […] amongst humans’, in contrast, it is implied, to the way in which his body was treated like that of an animal: slaughtered, and left naked to rot. For Adorno, the possibility that anti-Semites ‘do not see Jews as human beings at all’ is the ‘key to the pogrom’ and its aftermaths (2005, 105). Rural spaces of animal enclosure recur in Holocaust testimonies and cultural representations, which often describe how Jewish people hid in spaces associated with animals (as Grynberg’s family did, in a cowshed).9 In the afore-mentioned shots in Birthplace, the animals are all in yards or pens, in harnesses or on chains; they are captured, and subject to the needs and desires of their human owners. One can consider, then, that the images might refer us as much to the power structures visibly operating between human and farm animal, as to those between hiding Jewish people and their helpers. This is not to collapse the differences between the circumstances of farm animals and people in hiding from wartime terror, but rather to acknowledge that both are placed in positions of extreme vulnerability to the whims of others. As Pick argues, ‘human (and other) bodies are indiscriminately subject to natural necessity and powers from without’ (2011, 4). There is ‘nothing specifically “animal”’ about this subjection (2011, 4). It is such ‘power from without’ wielded by the Wojtyński brothers that decided the fate of Abram, whose life was

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apparently exchanged for those of the cows that he left with his eventual killers when he went into hiding. Here, to use Pick’s words (2011, 25), human and animal ‘circle one another in contagious proximity’. There are also, however, other associations that the images of animals bring to mind, which have to do with Grynberg’s difficult homecoming to a space that is cinematically rendered as hostile, with inhabitants that often lack empathy and warmth. The look between animal and human (or animal and camera) is frequently rendered as a site of incomprehension and alienation (Burt 2002, 38). In Catherine Russell’s analysis, for example, animals seem to ‘look without seeing […] nothing and no one looks back at [us] with any interest’ (cited by Burt 2002, 41).10 While much scholarship in animal studies would (rightly) encourage us to repudiate this impression of a passive animal gaze, the animal looks in Birthplace nevertheless seem framed and positioned in order to function in the manner that Russell suggests.11 Their looks evoke fear (spooked horses run from the camera) and hostility (dogs bark at the camera crew), but also disinterest or incomprehension. The chasm of understanding and meaning that seems to open up between animal and human prefigures the barriers to knowledge and the constructions of ‘otherness’ that will also haunt the encounters between humans.

Stratigraphic Images I have invoked Insdorf’s and Trigg’s notion of spaces that no longer know the one who returns in order to begin discussing particular disjunctions operating in Birthplace’s opening scenes in particular. Grynberg’s present perception, the camera’s framing of images of the frozen landscape, and his memories spoken in voice-over often do not fit together, forming separate audiovisual layers. In turning now to a Deleuzian conception of space and memory, I want to start considering how these layers are figured as something that must be sifted through in the film’s archaeological process. In his discussion of the Deleuzian notion of stratigraphic images (which I introduced in Chap. 2), Rodowick uses the opening moments of Lanzmann’s Shoah as an illustration of such layering. He describes how Shoah displays a landscape with ruined concrete foundations protruding from the earth. We have been informed by an introductory title that this is all that remains of the Chełmno death camp. As Rodowick writes, the camp’s existence is ‘buried’ in the landscape, and while ‘the camera can frame this landscape for us […] it cannot recount the story that is sunk in

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the earth and lost to the historical past’ (1997, 145–146). Instead, it falls on one of the only known living survivors of Chełmno, Szymon Srebnik, who has returned to the camp, to attempt to recount his memories from that time. Srebnik is able to definitively identify the site (‘It’s hard to recognise, but it was here’), but is only able to articulate what he saw there in a fragmentary way: ‘No one can describe it… And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now … I can’t believe I’m here.’ His disbelief in his own presence at the site is suggestive of what Trigg has called a ‘radical estrangement’ that is paradoxically compounded by, rather than overcome through, the ‘intense proximity between Srebnik and the location’ (2012, 260). For Rodowick, Srebnik’s voice draws attention to his present perception as well as his memory ‘as a buried interiority’, such that ‘the past is outside of both image and sound, unreachable by either’ (1997, 146). Deleuze has written that ‘the archaeological, or stratigraphic, image is read at the same time as it is seen’ (1995, 235). Viewers must ‘relink’ ‘the perceived with the remembered, the imagined, the known’ (1995, 235). The image does not simply show or equate visibility with knowledge (Rodowick 1997, 148). In Shoah, Srebnik returns to a Nazi death camp from which he narrowly escaped with his life; by contrast, in Birthplace, Grynberg returns to the once-homely territories of his upbringing, where his Polish neighbours both helped and hindered his survival. However, as in many other Holocaust films of return, Shoah’s influence is felt in Birthplace, as we see the returnee recount his memories of the past, while the landscapes are framed to highlight the disjunction between past and present. Birthplace encourages us to think about the specificity of these disjunctions for Polish-Jewish history. For example, as Grynberg remembers how his father would take him to the market place, where Jewish people traded with Catholic villagers, the film shows us a town square. But the lively atmosphere of Grynberg’s memories is missing, and we are given instead a dreary vision of a dull-coloured and sparsely populated village street, where a handful of men drink vodka. ‘Reading’ the stratigraphic layers suggests that the erasure of Jewish people and culture from these landscapes has diminished them. We are also once again confronted with anonymity, this time Grynberg’s rather than the landscape’s: as he recounts how the town residents in the past would address him, the people in the present ignore both the camera and him. When we hear Grynberg recall his memories of his family and their experiences in the town, we are shown people riding bicycles along the road, carrying shopping, and so on,

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creating the impression that they are entirely unaware of the history of the space that they move across. This history emerges only in fragmentary fashion through Grynberg’s voice. The visual and the acoustic thus become distinct ‘layers of a “stratigraphic” space’ (Rodowick 1997, 145). Grynberg is initially shown alone and anonymous in his birthplace. As the film continues, and we see his encounters with his former neighbours, this anonymity begins to dissipate, yet these early scenes cast a shadow over the rest of the film, suggestive of an atmosphere of exclusion that seems to emanate from both people and landscape. To begin thinking about Grynberg’s encounters with his former neighbours, in the past and in the filmed ‘present’, I turn now to Levinasian ethics, which will help to draw out the film’s constructions of ‘otherness’, responsibility and faciality.

The (Domestic) Mise-en-Scene of Rescue In Chap. 2, I briefly noted the ways in which Levinas’s writing has recently informed an understanding of violence against Jewish Poles during WWII.  Although Levinas never wrote specifically about situations of Holocaust rescue, his work on alterity opens up a way of thinking about the wartime encounters between the Grynberg family and the Polish gentile villagers, which are, in Birthplace, frequently discussed as instances of rescue or vital assistance. A number of villagers particularly recount providing food to the family. In his delineation of ethical responsibility, Levinas repeatedly uses the image of taking bread from one’s own mouth in order to give it to the other. Spargo notes how these references to bread indicate the point where the abstract and the metaphorical in Levinas’s work touches upon the literal and the particular, in a process that he calls a ‘metaphoric literalism’ (2006, 209). (A kind of ‘metaphoric literalism’ is also in operation in Birthplace’s figurative and physical excavations). Levinas does not, Spargo argues, intend for us to view the offering of bread to the other as merely ‘symbolic’ but rather as ‘a literal inscription of a demand impressed upon us’ (2006, 210). Ethics is ‘lived in the sensibility of an embodied exposure to the other’ (Critchley 2002, 21).12 In a Levinasian analysis, James Mensch has considered how situations of rescue during the Holocaust ‘normally began with a face-to-face encounter’ in which the Jewish person seeking shelter sought out their potential rescuers, forcing the latter to make a decision (2003, 99). In each such moment, he writes,

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what is at stake is a life. You can either admit the person at the door or turn him away to face an almost certain death […] if you don’t act, it is probable that no one else will […] Unasked for, you are confronted with a unique, non-transferable responsibility. (2003, 99–100)

In this encounter, the face of the person seeking rescue becomes a site that ‘exhibits life as threatened’ and which, in its mortality, evokes the commands ‘You shall not kill’ and ‘You are responsible for this life before you’ (2003, 105). Mensch analyses rescue through a vocabulary of domestic space: the Jewish person turns up ‘at the door’, and the inhabitant has to either ‘open the door or close it and turn the Jew away’ (2003, 99–100). Rescue here has a specific mise-en-scene—the domestic environment— and a spatial threshold—the door of the house. Many of the residents in Birthplace also frame rescue in a domestic mise-en-scene: they recall how Jewish people would turn up at the door or the window seeking food and aid. In the most extensive testimony involving rescue, one woman recalls how, when she was a young girl during the war, Abram’s family arrived on their doorstep, begging for admittance, and were given food and shelter. In considering the ways in which moments of rescue in the past are recounted, it is important to think about how Grynberg’s encounters with the villagers in the film’s present are framed. For Grynberg, too, is turning up on the thresholds of homes, seeking admittance and assistance. I have suggested that the film presents Grynberg’s return to his birthplace, and his relationship to the landscape, as indicative of a simultaneous familiarity and alienation. Beyond this, he himself also seems to appear as both familiar and strange to his former neighbours, who frequently struggle to ‘place’ or recognise him. His paradoxical state of familiarity and strangeness resonates with readings of what Spargo has termed the Levinasian ‘dichotomy of the stranger/neighbour’ (2006, 182). The figures of the stranger and the neighbour were used by Levinas to conceptualise the relation to the other. In his 1965 essay ‘Enigma and Phenomenon’, Levinas comments on the trope of the unknown person ringing the doorbell in Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano (Levinas 1996). Here, the neighbour and the stranger become imbricated (though not conflated); one can never be sure which is which, and who rings the bell (Spargo 2006, 208). The stranger might be ‘not yet or perhaps no longer the neighbour whom one habitually recognises’, yet the neighbour, too, approaches us as someone ‘who is alien even in his proximity and seeming familiarity’ (2006,

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205). A ‘spectral stranger’ can be discerned in every neighbour (2006, 208).13 In her commentary on Levinas’s conceptualisations of the stranger and the neighbour, Ahmed considers how immediate face-to-face encounters are ‘affected by broader social processes’ (2000, 145). For the Polish Catholic villagers, Grynberg returns as a specifically Jewish stranger/ neighbour, a construction that already carries with it further complicating socially and historically determined associations of proximity and distance, hostility and hospitality. Ahmed emphasises that we should not consider ‘otherness’ (or ‘strangeness’) to be a quality that one ‘has’, a property of their body or speech, as such thinking threatens to reduce the other’s alterity to established categories. Instead, she argues, alterity is produced and mediated in and through the encounter (2000, 144). These mediations occur at the level of the social, as aforementioned, but also on the level of the textual, in our encounters with philosophical and creative texts. Birthplace’s multiple encounters (for example, between Abram and his neighbours in the past, between Grynberg and the villagers in the ‘present’ of filming, and between viewers and filmed subjects in the viewing ‘present’) are all produced and mediated in multiple ways. The narratives of wartime rescue and assistance related in the film may echo Levinasian ethical principles (giving bread to the other, taking responsibility for their life in the face of the threat of one’s own annihilation, and so on), but these past encounters are inaccessible to us in their direct form.14 The narrations are self-conceptions that are likely to play down complicity in violence. The narratives of rescue and aid are performed and produced in the moment of their telling, through the encounter between the remembering villagers and the film crew (which, as mentioned earlier, may or may not have included Grynberg himself). The way in which we view these encounters is also mediated through the filmic mode of documentary, a point that this chapter will discuss below. Returning to Grynberg’s meeting with the woman whose parents sheltered the family when he was ill, we can consider how the ethical encounters of the past are produced and mediated through encounters in the present. Grynberg appearing at the threshold of the house seeking information carries echoes, however distant and however different the stakes, of the way in which the family sought shelter during wartime, and, as in the past, these villagers can choose to either invite him over the threshold or turn him away. Grynberg here is the stranger/neighbour who ‘rings the

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bell’. The rescuers’ daughter is initially filmed on the threshold of her home; she recognises Grynberg and is overjoyed that he is still alive. In a spatial echo of the night of rescue, the group then move inside the house to continue the interview. A trace, then, of the original encounter between the families seems to be activated here, as the testimony of rescue emerges in the same space as the rescue itself was purportedly carried out. The domestic interior also provides a mise-en-scene for the momentary conjoining of gentile and Jewish memory: as the woman recalls how her mother carried soup to those hiding in the forest, Grynberg recalls pine needles falling into this same soup. The literal and physical hospitality of the past and present thus extends into a kind of hospitality towards the memories of the other, which, in this particular moment, emerge in parallel. Viewing this episode in the film, we may be left with the impression of a paradigmatically ethical face-to-face encounter, set in the mise-en-scene of rescue and hospitality, the domestic space in which the stranger/neighbour is taken over the threshold of the home, and one’s responsibility to preserve the life of the other is recognised. Other encounters in the film test and stretch the parameters of ethical encounters; some directly contravene them, and will be treated in the next section. Even when Grynberg is invited across the thresholds, we hear of an exclusionary culture and indications of anti-Semitism; social divisions and categorisations loom. We continually hear about the demarcations between ‘Poles’ and ‘Jews’. ‘We were Poles and they were Jews’, one villager says to Grynberg, ‘but I went to their shop.’15 Grynberg’s family members are consistently described as ‘Jews’; they are always labelled. One witness somewhat awkwardly attempts to explain what happened at Grynberg’s parents’ wedding, where the dancing was ‘divided’: ‘Jewesses with Jewesses and Jews with Jews’. Grynberg tries to clarify this: ‘you mean men and women danced separately?’ On another occasion, Abram is described as a ‘familiar Jew’ (‘znajomy Żyd’). There is no malice in these particular statements; some of the villagers express a fondness for their former Jewish neighbours.16 Nevertheless, they are also suggestive of the ways in which encounters with the ‘stranger/neighbour’ are produced. Already the epithet ‘familiar Jew’ seems to contain a kind of paradox: a familiar person (a neighbour?) but at the same time of a different ‘category’ (a ‘Jew’, a stranger?). The Jewish villagers are categorised, ‘assimilated’ into an ‘economy of difference’ that defines them (Ahmed 2000, 150–151).

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Here, too, we might start to think about the different resonances of the vocabulary of the home and homecoming, which was frequently used by Levinas, sometimes in direct refutation of Heidegger. According to Levinas, Heidegger’s account of Being as dwelling, or ‘being at home with oneself’, fails to provide for a relation with alterity; the other is never ‘“at home” in its fundamental and irreducible alterity’ (Hand 2009, 39). Instead, in the ethical encounter, the stranger/neighbour who turns up on the threshold disturbs the ‘being at home with oneself’ of subjectivity (Hand 2009, 40). The other ‘cannot be assimilated, brought home, or interpreted within the order of the same’ (Kenaan 2013, 5). In Birthplace, however, the domestic interiors often seem to provide a stage for precisely this kind of assimilation, this ‘bringing home’ of the other to one’s own categories, a reduction of the other’s (Levinasian) radical alterity into the definable ‘otherness’ of the ‘Jew’.

The Landscape of Strained Ethics Attempts to preserve the integrity of one’s ‘home’ can happen ‘at the expense of the not-always-wanted neighbour’s death’; such, writes Zylinska, was the situation in Jedwabne, which signalled a ‘failure in the ethics of neighbourly hospitality’ (2007, 286). The murder of Abram by his Polish Catholic neighbour can be seen as another case where being faced with the infinite alterity of the other provoked not a sense of responsibility but rather yielded to ‘pervertability’ (Zylinska 2005, 117). The identity of Abram’s killer or killers (one or both of the Wojtyński brothers) is suggested by the villagers towards the end of Birthplace, and Grynberg’s final interview in the film takes place outside the home of the only living brother, Jan. The latter is initially filmed standing in a doorway while Grynberg asks him if he remembers Abram. He admits that he does, and claims that Abram had come to the farm begging to be killed. Grynberg listens to this blatant fabrication before prompting him further, telling him of the villagers’ claims that Jan and his brother were involved in Abram’s murder. Their conversation is interrupted by Jan’s son, who angrily confronts Grynberg, threatens to break the camera equipment, and demands that they leave immediately. No further discussion is possible. A final close-up lingers on Jan’s face, and the scene ends, the possibility of further revelations suspended. While Grynberg’s encounter with the rescuers’ daughter described in the previous section seemed to produce an echo of an original ethical encounter between the two families, set within

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the domestic mise-en-scene of rescue, here, the scene produces and mediates a trace of the violent turning from the other, of the ‘pervertability’ of the ethical relation, as Grynberg is expelled from the space of the home. As Prager notes, the aggression that led to Abram’s murder in the past seems to linger in the present; we are faced with the possibility that ‘the same violence could be repeated, son upon son’ (Prager 2015, 68). The murder of Abram constitutes the film’s most extreme example of ethical failure and denial of responsibility towards the other whose visage speaks the command ‘thou shalt not kill’. It is not, however, the only such example; we learn that Polish villagers left Grynberg’s younger brother, Buciek, at the mill, which guaranteed his death, and attempted to abandon Grynberg in the forest. In this section, I focus on other constraints on ethical relations that Birthplace suggests are in operation in ‘neighbourly’ encounters: the mechanisms of exclusion mounted against the Jewish stranger/neighbour (as already suggested above), and the fear of one’s own neighbours. The film strongly suggests that the knowledge of who was responsible for Abram’s murder was widespread and passed down through the generations; the bystanders are complicit in the silencing of the crime, and negligent at best in their attitude towards the memory and resting place of its victim. Decades later, many of them are still too frightened to speak of the murder or name the perpetrators. The fear of speaking in the present carries a trace of the fear of assisting Jewish people during wartime. In keeping the secret, however, they perpetuate the suppression of the original murder. Fear and exclusionary mechanisms also resonate spatially in the film’s framing. This can be illustrated through considering an encounter between Grynberg and a villager towards the end of the film. In this scene, the villager stands at the threshold of his cottage and is not shown greeting Grynberg, let alone inviting him in. The man claims that he hid the Grynberg family in his barn, but complains that he didn’t get anything in return. One might recall here how, in Levinas’s writing, ‘my orientation toward the Other’ is a kind of ‘generosity’ with no expectation of reciprocity (Ahmed 2000, 149). Linking this formulation to Derrida’s notion of the gift, Ahmed writes that ‘the stranger becomes present in this ethical encounter as the one to whom one must give, endlessly, and without return. This endless obligation to give defines the form of hospitality as an opening to the other, an open home’ (2000, 150). By contrast, this particular villager is closed to the other in his closed home; the threshold is blocked by his body while he refuses to share information. This refusal is

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presented as a performance of indifference to Grynberg’s requests and simultaneously as fear. He exclaims ‘what do I care, I don’t care’, while claiming that the family of Abram’s murderer will attack him if he speaks out. His refusal to speak further coincides with the closing of the door in Grynberg’s face. The encounters I have described thus far take place in or around the home, and produce echoes of past encounters in which the Grynberg family was either welcomed or turned away from the threshold. However, thinking about rescue, or its refusal, only in relation to a domestic mise-­ en-­scene has a number of limitations when we come to considering the recollections in Birthplace. Many of the villagers state that domestic spaces were the least safe for Jewish Poles seeking shelter, precisely because Polish Catholic neighbours could become aware of them and denounce them. Those who offered their assistance to the Jewish Poles around their homes in Birthplace recall the precarity of this situation and suggest that it was often a last resort for Jewish people in hiding. Once again, the home as a place of safety and familiarity is negated. Nevertheless, while not all encounters within the homes of Birthplace are particularly welcoming or hospitable, the encounters filmed outdoors are frequently even less so. Meetings between Grynberg and the villagers in exterior locations are often framed and edited so as to heighten impressions of both fear and hostility. In outdoor spaces even the pretence of welcome seems diminished (we tend not to hear anyone being invited into the home), while the fear of being seen and heard by neighbours is heightened in the exposed, public locations. In one suggestive example, Grynberg attempts to question a man who is gathering potatoes. He initially doesn’t recognise Grynberg (he says bluntly ‘I don’t know you’, and at first won’t face him). He eventually describes Buciek’s death at the hands of a German officer, after which the film’s editing suggests that he immediately turns his back on Grynberg and continues to gather potatoes, implying a callous unconcern regarding the effect of his recollections. The presence of other villagers is often suggested in interviews filmed outdoors: groups of men stand in the background, or off-screen voices indicate their invisible presence. In light of the residents’ fear of their neighbours, these anonymous people remind us that being seen to speak with or assist a Jewish person is not inconsequential. Their presence is indicative of what I identified in Chap. 2 as the ‘gaze of the neighbour’, embodied here by a watchful, ever-present community. The fear of this gaze is particularly palpable in one of the film’s final interviews in which a

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man confirms the names of Abram’s killers. He also confirms that Abram was killed with an axe, stripped naked and thrown into a swampy pit where he lay for a week before being buried. This encounter between Grynberg and the villager takes place on scrub land, a marginal space that seems to belong neither to the home nor to the public spaces of the community. The man soon becomes concerned that he is being watched and cuts the conversation short. It is telling that, when the film was initially televised in Poland in the 1990s, this scene was edited out and replaced with an intertitle to protect the man’s identity (Bielas 1993).

Face and Sur-face Having described some of the encounters with the villagers, I return here to the ideas about excavation that informed the previous sections of this chapter, before turning back again to Levinas to add further layers to our understanding of the film’s face-to-face encounters. To pursue the archaeological metaphor, the fragments of memories and stories that emerge from each encounter, as well as Grynberg’s own spoken memories in voice-over, create the impression that layers or strata are gradually being excavated. Of course, the past is not simply extracted in recollection; ‘memory’ emerges through the dynamics of particular encounters and at each moment of narrativisation and delivery. Nevertheless, the film can be seen as, in part, a process of combing through the ‘rubble’ of memories created by violence and dislocation, where the viewer is encouraged to read significance in what has been overlooked by official history (Marks 2000, 28). At the time the film was made, there was little attention paid in historical, political or public Polish discourse to incidents of Polish violence against Jewish Poles in rural areas. Furthermore, Grynberg himself did not know exactly what had happened to his father and was thus unable to speak much of his own family history. The film, then, like many of the intercultural works that Marks describes, emerged from silence and not-­ knowing. It unfolds in the face of the attempted erasure of Abram’s and Buciek’s lives and memory. The film confronts the ‘limits of thought’ by suggesting what cannot, or has not, been encompassed by official histories (Marks 2000, 29). Through acts of archaeology, both literal and metaphorical, the film builds a language through which to work at the edges of this ‘unthought’ (Marks 2000, 29). Each recollection that is ‘excavated’ contributes a new perspective to the film’s vision of the region’s history and the experiences of its

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inhabitants. And yet, no simple overall picture of the past emerges from these excavations. Some of the recollections corroborate each other, others sit uneasily alongside one another. The image and sound tracks at times conjoin, and at other points ‘show the limit of what each is able to represent’ (Marks 2000, 30). Several sequences seem edited together in a way that conforms to the coherent linearity of an investigation. For example, after one villager has mentioned the dugout where Abram’s family hid, we see Grynberg searching for its traces. At other times, however, the promise of the investigative framework, in which one clue leads to another, remains unfulfilled. The shape of the film’s geographical itinerary and the motives for moving from one location to the next are frequently not revealed to the viewer; instead, spaces seem to shift almost kaleidoscopically as we travel to or arrive at the next location. The frequent focus on roads, paths and doorways creates the impression of labyrinthine spaces, heightened by the way in which Grynberg is filmed crossing the screen from left to right and back again in continual movements of tracing and retracing. The spatial contours of the film evoke what Martin-Jones has called, after Bergson and Deleuze, ‘a giant virtual memory bank’ that continually changes shape around us (2013, 714). For Martin-Jones, this vision of memory emphasises the messy ‘multi-layering of time encountered when various people remember the same event, differently’, particularly where layers of the past have been ‘forgotten or deliberately obscured’ (2013, 714). In formulating this argument, Martin-Jones is writing specifically about Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010), which bears some similarity to Birthplace; both films feature people who dig through the earth in their search for the material remains of loved ones.17 Martin-Jones draws attention to the film’s construction of ‘affective landscapes’ through the ‘depictions of bodies merging with landscapes as they give oral testimonies’ (2013, 716). In describing one of the searching women, Martin-­ Jones considers how the ‘darker sunken cavities of her face’ and the folds of her skin ‘echo the pitted and pockmarked cavities in the rock wall behind her’ (2013, 718). Not only is the rock wall part of the landscape that archives history, it becomes intertwined with the human face that testifies, even giving the impression that the landscape ‘speaks’ through the face, while retaining the secrets of the ‘occluded’ past (2013, 718). Martin-Jones is here drawing on the Deleuzian notion of faceified images, in which images take on the quality or power of the face to express affect, and the image is faceified in that it ‘looks at us…even if it does not resemble a face’ (2013, 718,  citing Deleuze). This is a powerful way of

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formulating what is also a recurring interest of this book: the ways in which objects, images or surfaces seem to ‘look back’ at their viewers. The face in close-up has often been considered to have an affinity with landscape. Kracaeur, for example, suggested that the facial close-up can reveal ‘new and unsuspected formations of matter; skin textures are reminiscent of aerial photographs, eyes turn into lakes or volcanic craters’ (1997, 48). Conversely, for Béla Balázs, ‘landscape is a physiognomy, a face which anywhere and unexpectedly may look at us’ (cited by Koch and Hansen 1987, 169). In Birthplace, the villagers questioned by Grynberg are often framed in tight close-ups. As they deliver their memories, facial features become material terrains, visually rhyming with the folds, bumps and craters of the landscape. Such connections between the face and the landscape are resonant for the film’s archaeological impetus: both seem to be figured as a sur-face behind which, or underneath which, lies something to be uncovered or extracted. Through dwelling on these elderly faces in close-up, Birthplace gives the impression that behind them lie stories to be uncovered, linking the faces to the earth that may also potentially yield remnants and traces. And yet, extracting both testimonies and remains is always a fraught process, one that continually draws us towards the limits of what we can grasp, physically and epistemologically.

Between Epistemology and Ethics: The Visage Before considering the film’s actual excavation scene in more detail, I return here to a Levinasian-inspired reading that also asks questions about the limits of knowledge and the position of the face at these limits. I am particularly interested in how such questions have been framed in relation to documentary, which has traditionally placed emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge (Renov 2004, 148). Levinasian ethics recognises a potential ‘violence inherent in the acquisitive, totalising quest for knowledge’, reflected in documentary’s tendency to turn its subjects into ‘objects’ (Renov 2004, 148). This tension between ethics and epistemology is, however, considered by Renov to be a productive one, particularly when approaching documentaries about the Holocaust, understood as an event that itself undermined our belief in historical knowledge as well as constituting an ‘aporia for aesthetic representation’ (2004, 161). What might happen at this juncture between evoking Holocaust experience and attempting to formulate a more ethical relationship to the subjects presented on screen?

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Saxton has considered these questions in relation to Shoah in ways that are illuminating for an understanding of Birthplace. She notes that Lanzmann, in and through Shoah, is engaged in a relentless pursuit of knowledge involving frequent manipulation and coercion of his interviewees. He does not prioritise ethics over epistemology, as Levinas does; rather, ‘the boundless responsibility towards alterity conceptualised by Levinas is subordinated in the film to a quest for historical knowledge which is informed by a political agenda’ (Downing and Saxton 2010, 104). It is worth returning here to a brief comparison between Shoah and Birthplace, and in particular the ways in which the relationships between filmmakers and subjects are evoked by the films. Unlike Lanzmann, Łoziński is never seen or heard in Birthplace. If there were distressing questions addressed by him to Grynberg, these are not made visible or audible. Instead, we are given the impression that Grynberg is offering up his testimony without the forceful interventions displayed by Lanzmann. What we see, instead, is Grynberg directing questions to others. At times these flow from him in quick succession (was Abram lying on his back or face down in the ditch? Were there wounds on his head? Could they be seen?); at other times he remains silent as the bystanders prevaricate, forget, lie, or turn away. Reading Łoziński’s and Grynberg’s accounts of the filming of Birthplace gives us more of a sense of the complexity of their respective experiences of  ‘coming-to-know’. As mentioned earlier, Łoziński tended not to share his own knowledge with Grynberg, but rather directed him towards asking particular questions and captured his responses (Bielas 1993). In his reflection on the process of filming, Grynberg displays an ambivalent relationship to what he came to know: on the one hand, he writes, he learned valuable details of his family’s history. On the other hand, however, he learned things that ‘I would rather not know […] and that will now stay with me forever’ (1993a, 89). Rather than passing judgement on the ethical propriety of these particular situations and relationships, I wish to focus more narrowly on questions of epistemology and ethics insofar as they relate to the possible encounters between film and viewer. In other words, regardless of the specific relationships between filmmakers and filmed subjects, I am interested in how the subjects of the documentary might resist being reduced to objects of perception and knowledge for the viewer of the film, and how this irreducibility might align with ‘the asymmetrical relation to the Other in Levinasian thought’ (Cooper 2006, 5).18 For both Cooper and Saxton, it is in the face or visage of filmed others that such an ethical

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relation might be found. However, as noted in Chap. 2, the face that opens out to the infinite and transcendent alterity of the other cannot be precisely mapped onto a visible human face. The visage is not an object we can ‘see’; it commands me from beyond the visual field (Saxton 2007, 5). And yet, of course, there is an important relationship between the human face as a visual phenomenon, and the transcendence of the Levinasian visage. As Kenaan has written, this tension ‘between the visual and the non-­ visual dimension of the Other’s face’ is in fact an expression of the other’s presence, which is both approached through and ruptures the visible (2013, 10, 12). Both Cooper and Saxton ground their Levinasian readings in the facial close-up, a cinematic technique that might seem to heighten the ‘visibility’ of the human face and exemplify a desire to posses the face as object (Doane 2003, 92). The close-up, however, might also contribute to a  perceived inability to epistemologically grasp the filmed subject. Saxton notes that the facial close-ups of testifying witnesses in Shoah encourage us to ‘scan them for insights into the past and the present’, insights that, as the camera rests on their passive faces, may not be forthcoming (2007, 9). Facial close-ups may instead refute the idea that the face can express the subject’s interiority and make it available to our vision.19 Saxton’s reading parallels my argument that Birthplace seems to offer up (physiognomic and earthly) ‘surfaces’ behind or beyond which there lie hidden traces, while continually escaping our (literal and figurative) grasp. The film consistently returns to close-ups of Grynberg’s face as he listens to the bystanders’ memories, which are often both devastating and inadequate. Reaction shots encourage us to ‘read’ the effect of the recollections on his face. However, not unlike the faces in Shoah, his expression changes little throughout the film, disrupting our ability to gain purchase on the experiences recounted (Saxton 2007, 9). The intense focus on Grynberg’s face paradoxically signals a resistance to objectification and visualisation, potentially preserving his alterity. In Saxton’s reading of Shoah, the faces of the ‘survivor-witnesses’ function differently from those of the ‘German and Polish perpetrators and bystanders’ (Downing and Saxton 2010, 102). The close-ups of the latter become a kind of ‘lie detector’, as the micromovements of their faces suggest inconsistencies and untruths (2010, 102). This is to some extent true of Birthplace, in that the close-ups of the villagers encourage us to search their faces for signs of prevarication, hostility, and feigned amnesia. Yet I would argue that these faces, too, refuse us access to interiority,

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challenging, rather than confirming ‘the certainties of the viewing subject’, to use Cooper’s words (2006, 23). This is even the case with Wojtyński, whose face we may want to ‘read’ most, given the suggestions that have been made about his role in Abram’s death. Close-ups of his face allow us to scan its micromovements; initially he cannot look Grynberg in the eye, looks down and away frequently, and a faint upturn of the corners of his mouth disturbingly resembles a smile. These gestures are suggestive, but they only emphasise our position of not-knowing. Perhaps we can ‘read’ in his face that there is much more to the story he tells (or, perhaps more accurately, a very different version of it), but we are nevertheless denied access to it. This is partly because he refuses to tell the truth, partly because his son breaks off the interview, but it also signals the face-to-face encounter as a site of epistemological uncertainty. As Cooper argues, in such an encounter ‘there is no stable position of knowledge, comprehension, vision, perception or understanding generated’; each of these is ‘vulnerable to disruption’ (Cooper 2006, 23). The face ‘conditions a different way of seeing’ but it also requires a particular relationship of listening; the face is ‘a speaking face’ that calls us to responsibility through language (Cooper 2006, 22). Indeed, it is in part through this ‘contact with the spoken word’ that vision’s possessiveness may be undermined (Cooper 2006, 71). For Saxton, Shoah’s emphasis on spoken testimony ‘interpellates us not only as spectators but also, and perhaps most significantly, as listeners’ (Downing and Saxton 2010, 102). She points to the disjunctions between what we hear and what we see, as witnesses describe atrocities amidst the now-empty landscapes in which they took place, as a particular opening to the alterity of the past (2010, 103). I have argued, using a Deleuzian framework, that a similar disconnection occurs in Birthplace, particularly in the initial moments of Grynberg’s return where his memories are out of joint with the landscapes that we see in the present. A further disjunction frequently operates between Grynberg’s speaking voice (as he recounts his recollections in voice-over) and his visible face. His voice ‘speaks’, as it were, from ‘beyond’ the face that we can see on screen. Spoken testimony also opens out onto the faces of those not visible on film, such as Abram and Buciek.20 These missing faces are often referred to and described by villagers (as pretty, handsome, dirty, like or unlike Grynberg’s), yet cannot be ‘recuperated in images’, to use Saxton’s words (Downing and Saxton 2010, 103). Amidst the literal face-to-face encounters staged in the film, there are always, as Ahmed points out, other faces and ‘other encounters, other speech acts,

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scars and traumas, that remain unspoken, unvoiced’, and unseen, not able to be fully presented (2000, 157).

Excavating Posthumous Landscapes In the encounters with the villagers of this area of rural Poland, Birthplace requires us, alongside Grynberg, to sift through excavated memories and stories, where the truth of the past seems to be hovering just beyond our grasp. Perhaps the answers are ‘behind’ this face, or beneath the sur-face of this landscape? Both the face and the earth, however, are figured as barriers to further enquiry. For example, Grynberg is at one point shown the location of the dugout where he, his father, and many other Jewish Poles sheltered for a time during the war. Before we see the dugout, we watch Grynberg walking around a snowy landscape, while he attempts to describe a shelter that he only vaguely remembers. Two villagers lead him to the location of the dugout and also attempt to describe it; it was heavily camouflaged by branches, with just the chimney top protruding from the earth. None of this is visible on the surface.21 It might appear, however, that a kind of material deposit of this past has been inscribed onto the bodies of those recollecting. The men suggest the spatial parameters of what they are describing by attempting to physically mark out how long the dugout was and where its various elements were. In this interaction between the human and the environment, the site becomes momentarily what Kobielska and Szczepan have called a space of ‘testimonial gesticulation’ (2019). It is difficult, however, to know how accurately these gestures might map onto the dimensions of the sunken dugout. As they describe how Jewish villagers hid within this landscape, the men’s faces are shown in close-up; at this moment, facial surfaces become barriers to further knowledge, for the men claim to have no idea where the victims are buried. Grynberg is shown scraping the snow from the earth, suggesting a powerful desire to uncover and grasp something, physically and epistemologically. We might be reminded of how Levinas, in his discussion of ontology, connects knowledge with physical possession: ‘ontology is like the movement of the hand, the organ for grasping and seizing, which takes hold of (prend) and comprehends (comprend) things in a manipulation of otherness’ (Critchley 2002, 16). In this moment, however, neither faces nor snowy surfaces yield anything further.22

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Towards the end of the film, however, the extraction of knowledge concerning where Abram was buried allows Grynberg and the film crew to oversee an excavation that is, at least to some extent, more ‘successful’. The ordinary-looking space at the edge of a field where this excavation takes place is a typical ‘non-site of memory’ (Sendyka 2013; see Chap. 2): unmarked by commemorative objects, yet persisting in the memories of the villagers, who now attack the ground with pickaxes. The number of bystanders that gather to watch seems to steadily increase. By the time a pit is dug, around fifteen people stand on its edges. The camera registers their presence in a circular pan, indicating their role within the posthumous ecology traced by the film. The unearthing has the draw of a spectacle, an uncomfortable reminder of the spectacle that Jewish suffering and death frequently became for non-Jewish Poles. Indeed, earlier in the film, we heard a man confessing that he and his friends deliberately went to watch Buciek’s murder. We may be reminded, too, of the fact that the villagers had claimed that ‘everyone’ saw Abram lying in this spot before an unknown person or persons buried him in the pit. Their gathering here thus has the force of a repetition, though with a difference. As Prager (2015, 68) notes, in the past they or their relatives may have walked past Abram’s body; here and now, they must reckon with Abram’s continued presence in their midst. For Żukowski, this is a moment of confrontation with the ‘unwanted knowledge’ of their own complicity in the silencing of the crime and lack of respect shown to Abram’s body (2018a, 92–93). As the digging proceeds, the film continues to cut back to members of this group, training the lens on those who were accustomed to looking with impunity. As the earth’s surface is broken open, close-ups of muddy clods alternate with images of the men silhouetted against the sun, as well as tightly framed shots of their faces. Grynberg’s voice-over returns. A moment ago, one of the bystanders had remembered that, during the war, Abram often had a milk bottle with him, which was thrown into the pit with his body. ‘If you find the bottle here, you will find your father’, he had stated. Now, Grynberg recalls that his father would often milk the cows in secret and give the milk, in this bottle, to his family. A sudden clink of glass heralds the discovery of the bottle, and it is removed from the earth, covered with muddy clay. The discussion of the bottle and the images of it being extracted are closely linked, as though the earthy layers that have covered the physical object, and the memories surrounding it, are being excavated together. The literal archaeological investigation, and the metaphorical

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process of sifting through layers of memory, collapse into each other. The milk bottle constitutes what Marks has termed a recollection-object that encodes ‘discursive layers’ and ‘material interactions’ (2000, 80). Recollection-objects ‘condense time within themselves, and […] in excavating them we expand outwards in time’ (2000, 77). The object prompts a multiplicity of ‘unresolved pasts to surface in the present of the image’ (2000, 84). Used to hold the milk that nurtured a hidden family, the bottle was quite literally a lifeline, yet it also reminds us of the possibility that Abram was killed so that his cows would not have to be returned to him. For Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska (2012, 252), the bottle materialises links between the Jewish family in hiding and the surrounding villagers, pointing towards the help that was given to Abram as well as gesturing towards Polish guilt and responsibility.23 After finding the bottle, the men realise that they must be close to Abram’s body and begin to probe the ground with the shovel. In another moment, we hear the spade strike bone with a sickening crack, which seems to disjoin linear time itself. After the long process of searching, interviewing and digging, we are suddenly and quickly brought face-to-­ face with human remains. There are at least two significant temporal ellipses in these final moments of the excavation. As soon as the crack of the bone is heard, the film suddenly cuts to an image of a skull sticking partway out of the earth. The camera is trained on Grynberg as he uses his hands to extract the fragments from the clay, tries helplessly to put the bone pieces back together, and after a moment, brings himself face-to-face with the skull. In the second ellipsis, the film cuts from an image of Grynberg to an image of the skull and bones arranged neatly on the muddy grass. Grey sludge fills the eyeholes of the skull and clots the bones, making them nearly indistinguishable from the earth that has yielded them. These material remains are multiply resonant. In their blending with the earth, they are presented as a fragment from what Martin-Jones has called the ‘landscape’s historical archive’ (2013, 717). For Grynberg, they are precious relics. Remarkably, he describes holding the skull in a way that echoes a face-to-face encounter, though one that emphasises recognition rather than Levinasian alterity: ‘I looked into his face […] and I had the kind of pleasant feeling you get when you encounter someone very close to you’ (1993a, 89). The bones are arranged in a tableau, as though the response to the disconcerting decomposition of human remains is to recompose them and the cinematic frame into a kind of portrait or catalogue of material evidence. They recall another arrangement of remains,

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those in the photograph analysed by Gross in Golden Harvest, where he considers how ‘tidying up’ the bones is ‘an attempt to normalise this horrible scene, part of an effort to give it meaning’ (Gross with Grudzińska-­ Gross 2012, 27; see Chap. 2). Skeletal matter is presented as potentially readable, extracted from soil reconceptualised as an earth-archive. Simultaneously, however, Abram’s skull also reveals the decomposed framework of the face, the skeletal underpinnings of every face that has turned towards us and to Grynberg to impart memories. As I have suggested, the film has focused on the face as a potential terrain or surface that mediates the spoken memories that seem to lie ‘behind’ it, not unlike the way in which objects might lie beneath the layers of earth that cover them. Yet rather than leading to further revelations or extractions of testimony, this piece of human matter is muted. Abram’s skull is a denial of the illusion that meaning and memory lie behind the face’s surface, as it brings us up against the skeletal matter that is really ‘behind’ a face. The ellipses described above, in which the actual process of extracting the bones from the dirt is largely elided, create a shuddering effect, as the moment of discovery warps temporal continuity. At the moment where everything seems to become evident (as in visible, and in the legal sense of ‘evidentiary’), we are faced with visual and temporal distortion. The appearance of the remains brings nearly everything to a halt. A cut to Grynberg shows that he can no longer speak. On the soundtrack we can clearly hear the drone of an aeroplane. This prosaic sound intrudes into Grynberg’s distress and, as in the opening sequences where his spoken memories were heard over images of people going about everyday activities, impresses upon us the obliviousness of the wider world to one’s individual suffering. The sound also reminds us of the arrival of the plane that signalled Grynberg’s return at the film’s opening. Then, we were alerted to the landscape as the place of his birth, now, we are to leave the filmic space with an awareness of this place as a posthumous landscape, a site of death. Marks has argued that the work conducted in metaphorical acts of archaeology ‘requires the sometimes traumatic interrogation of personal and family memories, only to create an empty space where no history is certain’ (2000, 5). This can, she continues, ‘be a psychically draining experience. The story suspends in order to contemplate this emptiness, which is narratively thin but emotionally full’ (2000, 5). The acts of excavation performed in the many intercultural works that she analyses dismantle official history. The moment of suspension that is ushered in

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through this dismantling, she claims, also signals a beginning, as intercultural films start to call upon other forms of cultural knowledge (2000, 26). As a work of film, Birthplace has proven to be influential as a kind of beginning, a working towards the edges of the ‘unthought’, an opening of a gap in the officially prescribed narratives of Polish-Jewish history. And yet, the film itself ends at the moment of suspension that Marks describes: at the moment of psychic draining, emptiness, and narrative thinness. There is no staging of renewal or productive mourning.24 The film thus challenges the ‘fullness’ of the archaeological metaphor, its faith in ‘bringing-­to-presence’ (Wylie 2009, 279). On the one hand, the excavation yields bones and some knowledge about Abram’s murder. At the same time, the memories unearthed are fragmentary and tentative, and fall short of decisive explanations, while the bones that are excavated are also an overwhelming mark of the person’s absence. They speak powerfully of loss, of the sliding of a loved individual towards matter arranged in a tableau on slimy mud.

Proximity: Facing Us, Facing Away This chapter has considered some of the ethical ramifications of the relationships evoked by Birthplace, including between Abram and his neighbours in the past, and between Grynberg and his former neighbours in the present. In its examination of Birthplace’s facial close-ups, the chapter also began to consider the creation of an ethical relationship between filmed subjects and the viewer. This section focuses on the ethical possibilities of viewers’ engagements with Grynberg, despite film’s inability to imitate the immediacy of the face-to-face encounter envisaged by Levinas (Downing and Saxton 2010, 100). How might we characterise the ethical relationship that the film creates and mediates between Grynberg and the viewer? I have already mentioned the ways in which the close-ups of his face, and the attentiveness to his reactions, might indicate the presence of alterity beyond our visual grasp. The close-ups also signal a more general tendency in the film to bring viewers ‘close’ to Grynberg as we follow him throughout his journeys in vehicles or on foot. This closeness oscillates with forms of distancing. The film tends to eschew Grynberg’s direct point-of-view; we are not put in his ‘place’. The camera follows his movements, cutting between mid-shots and long-shots in which we see him through trees or amongst people; in Chap. 2, I suggested that this technique evokes a watchful ‘gaze of the neighbour’, but there are other ways of reading these

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moments. When we hear his memories in voice-over, as I have suggested, these are disjointed from the image before us. They arrive to us as fragments, hard to place in chronological order or locate in geographical space, making it difficult to grasp the totality of his experience. Alongside Grynberg’s spoken memories and his questions, we are also faced with his frequent silence. He rarely comments on the villagers’ recollections. On the one hand, this silence is reflective of the general silencing of the Jewish survivor or returnee, whose memories of being denounced, robbed and threatened by his Polish neighbours cannot be fully spoken in the space in which these acts occurred, as they continue to be denied. On the other hand, as they accumulate through the duration of the film, these incidents have the potential to create a particular relationship between Grynberg and the viewer. It would be difficult to characterise this relationship as straightforward ‘identification’ or ‘empathy’ (in the sense that this has been used in film studies to suggest that a viewer might undergo emotions or experiences almost as the filmed subject does). Instead, the film creates a relation of proximity that implies both closeness and distance. In Cooper’s Levinasian reading of the films of the Dardenne brothers, she describes how placing the viewer ‘with’ the character, but without replicating their perception, encourages a ‘recognition of responsibility’ (2007, 84–85). Sinnerbrink, too, describes how proximity, rather than ‘identificatory alignment or straightforward moral allegiance’ carries less risk of ‘“totalizing” the Other’ (2016, 156). The creation of a ‘space of responsibility’, to use Cooper’s term (2007, 85), accumulates through the film’s unfolding. Birthplace’s final scene, then, in many ways both encapsulates this ethical ‘space’ and pushes it furthest. Following the discovery of the remains, we see Grynberg slumped against a fence, his back to us. The camera zooms in towards him, then cuts to a different angle that shows him in profile. The zoom and the cut both seem to be attempts to ‘grasp’ and perhaps ‘comprehend’ (prend and comprend) Grynberg’s reaction, which he has chosen to remove from the camera’s field of vision. In the next shot, Grynberg does face the camera, but he seems unable to speak, and turns away again. While his face has been relatively impassive throughout the film, here we can see that he is crying. We briefly watch Grynberg’s suffering before he turns away. For Levinas, the suffering of others calls up a responsibility on the part of those witnessing it, potentially evoking what Cohen calls a ‘painful solidarity’ with the sufferer, a solidarity that does not, however, subsume or intrude (2009, 278).25 Eventually, as though finally respecting his turn

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away from us, the camera stops trying to move towards Grynberg; instead, after a few seconds, the film fades to black and ends. In Levinasian thought, the turned back is suggestive of how the face-­ to-­ face encounter transcends the literal human face. In ‘Peace and Proximity’ Levinas draws attention to the way in which Vassili Grossman, in his work Life and Fate, describes a queue of political detainees as a line of ‘expressive’ backs, able to ‘transmit states of mind’ (1999, 167, citing Grossman).26 The queuing people are described as having ‘shoulder blades tensed as if by strings, and they seemed to shout, to cry, to sob’ (1999, 167, citing Grossman). In her commentary on this passage, Judith Butler writes that the Levinasian face here ‘seems to consist in a series of displacements such that a face is figured as a back, which, in turn, is figured as a scene of agonized vocalization’, but one that is wordless, marking the ‘limits of linguistic translation’ (Butler 2006, 133, 134). Cooper draws on these ideas in her analysis of the films of the Dardennes. She argues that frequent scenes in which characters have their backs, rather than their faces, to the camera or to each other function as moments of ‘iconoclasm’ that rupture cinematic clichés of representation (Cooper 2007, 71–72). The focus on the back rather than the face brings these filmic moments closer to Levinas’s own iconoclasm in his writing on aesthetic representation.27

Silence and Silencing In Birthplace’s final images, then, we are confronted with Grynberg’s bent back, expressive in its suffering, a last turning away and refusal of the facial close-up. We are also left with his silence, testifying to the ‘limits of what can be vocalised’ (Cooper 2007, 75). This silence might, however, evoke a paradoxical eloquence related to ethical responsibility. In Glowacka’s Lyotard-inspired analysis of Holocaust testimony, she considers how the speech of survivors ‘arrives from the abyss of silence, where language was threatened with absolute cessation’ (2012, 117). Silences are delivered to us with the ethical imperative that ‘we listen, or, in Lyotard’s idiom, that we “lend an ear” to what still remains to be phrased’ (2012, 125). Silence may also carry the ethical injunction to remember. This ‘obligates us unconditionally’, but not always or necessarily in a manner that is clear or instructive; it becomes our own responsibility to formulate it (2012, 112). Birthplace brings us face-to-face with death as alterity. For Levinas, as Chantner writes, ‘death is disquieting: there is in death a surplus of

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meaning […] that is uncontainable’ (2001, 220). In Spargo’s reading of Levinas, similarly, ‘despite our every attempt to contain death within symbolic structures, the interruptive significance of death is inescapable’ (Spargo 2006, 39). If death is an ‘interruptive’ force, then we can consider how the material indices of death in Birthplace—the skull and bones— quite literally interrupt the further progress of the film. Rather than show the accompanying funerary rites, the film leaves us in this moment before the productivity of arranging and carrying out commemorative practices. The film remains within what Spargo has called a ‘vigilant memory’, in which memory is characterised not by knowledge of the past but rather by mournfulness. Mourning in Levinas’s writing is not, however, to be confused with the Freudian detachment from the object (Spargo 2006, 39). Rather, it refers to a vulnerability before the other and a refusal to instrumentalise them through utilitarian forms of remembrance that allow ‘the other who has died to become nothing but past’ (Spargo 2006, 46). In Levinasian mourning, we cannot fold the other’s death into a historical, chronological time: ‘the other who dies announces a time fundamentally separate from the time of those who survive him, a secrecy at the heart of interiority’ (Spargo 2006, 45). In its suspicion of possessing the other through instrumentalising their death, and in the way in which death is seen as a refusal of categorisation and resistant to comprehension (Chantner 2001, 220), a Levinasian philosophy of mourning and death can be paralleled with Brinkema’s writing on grief’s painful purposelessness, which Chap. 5 will explore in relation to Pawlikowski’s Ida. Birthplace then, emerges from silence. For Łoziński, the film is in many ways ‘about’ silence (cited by Łysak 2017). To some extent, it also returns us to silences. These are both ethical silences, as well as a muteness that indicates processes of silencing, in the difficulty of discussing further the complicity of the Polish  Catholic bystanders and the material benefits emerging from murders of Jewish Poles. Much is left unspoken in the film. It seems unsurprising, in this light, that what the film could vocalise was often unheard upon its release. Łoziński recounts how, at one film festival in Kraków, the jury refused to believe that Abram’s death, burial and exhumation had occurred in the way that it was presented and accused him of planting Abram’s remains. In Łoziński’s view, the viewing public were not yet ready to absorb the history that Birthplace delineated (Łysak 2017). In the years following the Jedwabne revelations, however, the film has to some extent moved beyond such silencing, and become its own kind of

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material archive, a ‘moving picture as archive memory’, to use Wahlberg’s term (2008, xiv). As subsequent chapters will show, aspects of Birthplace’s aesthetics and concerns have been excavated or exhumed by later filmmakers such as  Paweł Pawlikowski and Władysław  Pasikowski, who conduct their own cinematic layerings. Though these filmmakers produce works with different ethical and political implications, Birthplace might nevertheless be seen as potentially a site of a transformative ethical encounter, whose effects reverberate in the present day. As Cooper has written, ethical encounters in documentary are capable of introducing spectators to something new that […] cannot be assimilated through filmic vision […] the ethical cuts through the certainties of the subject who sees, creating a selfless encounter through which we might begin to see differently both in the cinematic space and beyond. (2007, 93)

Birthplace, and the manifold ethical encounters that are inscribed within it, has provoked this way of seeing (and listening) differently, affecting later films that echo, without assimilating, its vision of historical experience.

Notes 1. Critics have often used the vocabulary of archaeology and exhumation when discussing the film. Łysak (2016, 284), for example, calls the film an ‘archaeological investigation’, while Litka terms it an ‘exhumation of memory’ (2011, 883). He connects this to the driving force behind Grynberg’s own writing, which he considers to be akin to a kind of ‘exhumation’ of Holocaust victims and a preservation of their material traces (2011, 884). Prager (2015, 64) describes the film as mediated through an ‘excavator’s gaze’. 2. In this layering I follow a number of film theorists who have considered Levinasian thought alongside that of Deleuze and Guattari, including Cooper (2006, 28). Girgus (2010) argues that Deleuze ‘advances elements that can help in applying Levinasian theory to film’, particularly as he postulates ‘the importance of a discordant temporal order for new ethical discourse’, and imagines a cinema able to free ‘the imagination from closed boundaries of thought’ (2010, 223). Girgus associates the disjunctions of the Deleuzian time-image with a Levinasian ‘diachronic time’ ‘beyond ­ordinary linear time’ (2010, 56). See also Harvey (2017), who entwines Levinasian and Deleuzian approaches to the face.

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3. Łysak gives as examples the release of Long Night/Długa Noc (Janusz Nasfeter, Poland, 1967), which had been shelved under state socialism, and the production of Just Beyond This Forest/Jeszcze Tylko Ten Las (Jan Łomnicki, Poland, 1991). 4. For a history and analysis of Shoah’s reception in Poland, see Kwieciński (2012). 5. For Molisak (2019, 49) Grynberg as a writer can also be defined as a ‘medium’, as he positions himself as a subject speaking on behalf of those who perished in the Holocaust, including his own family and friends. She describes his oeuvre as ‘mediumistic’. 6. Łysak calls the film an ‘investigative documentary’ (2016, 153). See also Prager, who compares Grynberg to a ‘dogged detective’ ‘in the mode of Lanzmann’ (2015, 64). Given what we know about the film’s production it might be more accurate to think of Łoziński in this role, though he himself is never visible or audible in the film (he might also, considering the comments he has made about Shoah, object to the comparison). 7. This citation is taken from Grynberg’s book Dziedzictwo (variously interpreted as Inheritance or Legacy), published in the year following the release of Birthplace (1993a). It is made up of a series of monologues by, and dialogues with, the villagers interviewed during filming. The work includes scraps of conversation that didn’t make it into the finished film, a section containing Grynberg’s recollections (some of which were used in the film’s voice-overs) and his further reflections on the filming process. 8. See also Cinquegrani (2018), who has eloquently pursued the idea of the journey, as literal and figurative, in Birthplace. 9. See Grynberg (1993b, 17). 10. Russell is here referring to the look of an owl towards the camera in Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986). 11. In his critique of Russell’s analysis, for example, Burt notes that ‘there is no presumption here that the look of an animal might be an active one’, and there is a slippage between the notion that we do not have access to the animal’s thinking, and the idea that the animal has no ‘thinking’ at all (Burt 2002, 41–42). 12. For Eaglestone, the image of bread in Levinas’s writing more specifically references the concentration camp, where to give one’s own ration to another, when one is at the point of starvation, is literally to give yourself to them (2004, 258). 13. Spargo notes how the figures of the stranger and the neighbor change throughout Levinas’s body of work. After ‘Enigma and Phenomenon’ the neighbour for Levinas comes to signify not so much a relation of familiarity but of proximity, not of knowledge but of responsibility even towards those whom one does not know (Spargo 2006, 212).

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14. As Waterson writes, testimonial narration is a performative act that is partly produced through relationships between interviewer, testifier, and actual or imagined audience (Waterson 2007, 51). 15. This statement reminds us that Jewish shops before WWII were sometimes boycotted in villages, and both Jewish shopkeepers and the non-­Jewish people who shopped there were sometimes attacked by nationalist Poles. 16. Other statements by the villagers are openly hostile, however. For example, one man opines that Jewish people were stupid for circumcising their sons and comes close to blaming them for their fate during the Holocaust. 17. In Guzmán’s film, the searchers are women who routinely comb the Atacama Desert for the remains of those ‘disappeared’ by the Pinochet regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Guzmán’s approach to history is admittedly more expansive than Łoziński’s; the film reaches back to the origins of life on Earth. See Martin-Jones (2019, especially 91–118) for an extended analysis of the earth as a planetary archive. 18. In this I am also following Saxton’s example. Saxton locates Shoah’s ethics not in Lanzmann’s relationship to his interviewees but in the relationship between the film and its viewers (2010, 101). For an important account of the ethics of the relationship between filmmaker and subject (including in Shoah), see Piotrowska (2014, 132–145). 19. See also Harvey (2017) who pursues a similar argument in relation to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film The Master (USA). 20. Once again, I take inspiration from Saxton’s writing on Shoah (2010, 103). 21. There were, however, traces of human activity below the surface of this site; as Grynberg describes, an excavation of the dugout revealed fragments of pottery, wood, and metal (1993a, 88). This dig is not shown in the film. 22. Curiously, Prager argues that ‘this ill-defined space both is and is not a cemetery; bones remain there’ (2015, 66). It should be noted that the villagers state that there are no human remains under this surface. Grynberg also writes that no human remains were found during the excavation of the site, though he describes the dugout as the ‘grave of my mother’s entire family’ (1993a, 90). 23. For Mąka-Malatyńska, the milk bottle recalls Zofia Nałkowska’s short story ‘Kobieta Przy Torze Kolejowym’/‘By the Railway Track’ from the collection Medaliony/Medallions (1946), and Andrzej Brzozowski’s film adaptation, Przy Torze Kolejowym/By the Railway Track (Poland, 1963). These works revolve around a heavily injured Jewish woman who has escaped from a rail transport heading to a camp. The local Polish villagers do not help her, though they leave her a cup of milk. She is eventually shot by a Polish policeman after pleading for death. 24. Abram was reburied in Warsaw’s Powązki Cemetery, but this is not shown in the film.

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25. Commenting on Levinas’s writing on suffering, particularly in relation to the Holocaust, Cohen describes how suffering denotes the ‘meaningless painfulness of pain’ which is ‘intrinsically excessive, unwanted, not to be accommodated’ (2009, 274). There are parallels here with Brinkema’s writing on how grief highlights the ‘peculiar painfulness’ of pain (2014, 70). I will return to Brinkema’s work on grief in Chap. 5. 26. ‘Peace and Proximity’ comments on the state of Europe after two world wars, genocide and imperial exploitation. Aptly for this chapter, the events of Vassili Grossman’s Life and Fate take place during WWII and the Holocaust, and describes what Levinas has called a ‘completely dehumanized’ society (1999, 106). Grossman visited Treblinka with Red Army troops after the camp’s liberation in 1944 and described its operations. He accompanied members of the Polish-Soviet Commission for Investigation of German Crimes, who recommended the preservation of the camp’s documents and analysis of its mass graves (Gross with Grudzińska-Gross 2012, 20). This report went largely unheeded and the camp fell into neglect. It was in part this lack of safeguarding that provided the conditions for some Polish citizens (and Soviet soldiers) to sift through the human remains searching for gold. What has been termed a ‘Gold Rush’ at Treblinka has been described by, amongst others, Gross and GrudzińskaGross (2012) and Rusiniak (2008), though these accounts are disputed (see Chap. 2). 27. See in particular Cooper’s analysis of the ending of La Promesse (Belgium/ France, 1996), in which the young protagonist Igor confesses to the refugee Assita that his own father was responsible for the death of her husband. This confession is delivered to her back as she faces away from Igor, who is also filmed with his back to the camera. This image of ‘staggered backs’ ‘enables the filmic rendering of the Levinasian ethical encounter’ (2007, 72).

References Aaron, Michele. 2014. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography, and I. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life. London and New York: Verso. Ahmed, Sarah. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London and New York: Routledge. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Bielas, Katarzyna. 1993. Miejsce dochodzenia. Gazeta Wyborcza, 21 October. Brinkema, Eugenie. 2014. The Forms of the Affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Brzozowski, Andrzej. 1963. Przy Torze Kolejowym/By the Railway Track. Poland. Burt, Jonathan. 2002. Animals in Film. London: Reaktion Books. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso. Chantner, Tina. 2001. Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cinquegrani, Maurizio. 2018. Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cobel-Tokarska, Marta. 2018. Desert Island, Burrow, Grave: Wartime Hiding Places of Jews in Occupied Poland. Trans. Katarzyna Błachnio-Sitkiewicz. Berlin: Peter Lang. Cohen, Richard A. 2009. Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy: Interpretation After Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, Sarah. 2006. Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary. London: LEGENDA Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. ———. 2007. Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers. Film-­ Philosophy 11 (2): 66–87. Critchley, Simon. 2002. Introduction. In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 1–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dardenne, Luc, and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. 1996. La Promesse. Belgium/France. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Cinema 2: The Time Image. London and New  York: Continuum. Doane, Mary-Ann. 2003. The Close-up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema. Differences 14 (3): 88–112. Downing, Lisa, and Libby Saxton. 2010. Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters. London and New York: Routledge. Drabinski, John E. 2011. Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eaglestone, Robert. 2004. The Holocaust and the Postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Girgus, Sam B. 2010. Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics and the Feminine. New York: Columbia University Press. Glowacka, Dorota. 2012. Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics and Aesthetics. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Gross, Jan T., with Irena Grudzińska-Gross. 2012. Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grynberg, Henryk. 1993a. Dziedzictwo. London: Aneks. ———. 1993b. The Jewish War and The Victory. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Guzmán, Patricio. 2010. Nostalgia for the Light. France/Germany/Chile/Spain. Hand, Seán. 2009. Emmanuel Levinas. London and New York: Routledge.

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Harvey, James. 2017. The Unknowable Soldier: Ethical Erasure in The Master’s Facial Close-Ups. In Disappearing War: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cinema and Erasure in the Post-9/11 World, ed. Christina Hellmich and Lisa Purse, 92–110. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Insdorf, Annette. 2003. Indelible Shadows: Films of the Holocaust. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kenaan, Hagi. 2013. The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Kobielska, Maria, and Aleksandra Szczepan. 2019. “Testimoniality”: A Lexicon of Witnesses of Non-sites of Memory. Unpublished conference draft. Research Centre for Memory Cultures, Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University. Koch, Gertrud, and Miriam Hansen. 1987. Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things. New German Critique 40: 167–177. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1997. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kwieciński, Bartosz. 2012. Obrazy i Klisze. Między Biegunami Wizualnej Pamięci Zagłady. Kraków: Universitas. Lanzmann, Claude. 1985. Shoah. France/UK. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1996. Enigma and Phenomenon. In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T.  Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, 65–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. Michael B. Smith. London: The Athlone Press. Litka, Piotr. 2011. Odzyskiwanie Pamięci. Miejsce urodzenia Pawła Łozińskiego i Sa ̨siedzi Agnieszki Arnold. In Pamięć Shoah: Kulturowe Reprezentacje i Praktyki Upamiętnienia, ed. Tomasz Majewski and Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska, 2nd ed., 883–890. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Officyna. Łomnicki, Jan. 1991. Jeszcze Tylko Ten Las/Just Beyond This Forest. Poland. Łoziński, Paweł. 1991. Journey. Poland. ———. 1992. Birthplace/Miejsce Urodzenia. Poland. Łysak, Tomasz. 2016. Od Kroniki do Filmu Posttraumatycznego—Filmy Dokumentalne o Zagładzie. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN Wydawnictwo. ———. 2017. Wydobyć skrywane historie. Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu, 3. Accessed 16 April 2020. http://akademiapolskiegofilmu. pl/pl/historia-polskiego-filmu/artykuly/wydobyc-skrywane-historie-zpawlem-lozinskim-o-miejscu-urodzenia-rozmawia-tomasz-lysak/603. Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska, Katarzyna. 2012. Widok z Tej Strony: Przedstawienia Holocaustu w Polskim Filmie. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Durham: Duke University Press. Martin-Jones, David. 2013. Archival Landscapes and a Non-anthropocentric “Universe Memory”. Third Text 27 (6): 707–722.

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———. 2019. Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History. London and New York: Routledge. Mensch, James R. 2003. Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation. Albany: State University of New York Press. Molisak, Alina. 2019. On Behalf of the Dead: Mediumistic Writing on the Holocaust in Polish Literature. In The Spectral Turn: Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire, ed. Zuzanna Dziuban, 49–64. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Nałkowska, Zofia. 1946. Medaliony/Medallions. Warsaw: Czytelnik. Nasfeter, Janusz. 1967. Długa Noc/Long Night. Poland. Pawlikowski, Paweł. 2013. Ida. Poland/Denmark/France/UK. Pick, Anat. 2011. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Piotrowska, Agnieszka. 2014. Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Prager, Brad. 2015. The Act of Digging: Archaeology, Photography and Forensics in Birthplace and Holocaust by Bullets. In Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images and the Ethics of Representation, ed. Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer, 59–75. New York and Chichester: Wallflower Press. Renov, Michael. 2004. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Rodowick, D.N. 1997. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rusiniak, Martyna. 2008. Obóz zagłady Treblinka II w pamięci społecznej (1943–1989). Warsaw: Neriton. Saxton, Libby. 2007. Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann. Film-Philosophy 11 (2): 1–14. ———. 2008. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Sendyka, Roma. 2013. Pryzma—zrozumieć nie-miejsce pamięci (non-lieu de mémoire). Teksty Drugie 1 (2): 323–344. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2016. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film. London and New York: Routledge. Spargo, R. Clifton. 2006. Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Trigg, Dylan. 2012. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: University of Ohio Press. Viola, Bill. 1986. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like. USA. Wahlberg, Malin. 2008. Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Waterson, Roxana. 2007. Trajectories of Memory: Documentary Film and the Transmission of Testimony. History and Anthropology 18 (1): 51–73.

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Wylie, John. 2009. Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34: 275–289. Żukowski, Tomasz. 2018a. Wielki Retusz: Jak Zapomnieliśmy, że Polacy Zabijali Żydów. Warsaw: Wielka Litera. Zylinska, Joanna. 2005. The Ethics of Cultural Studies. London and New  York: Continuum. ———. 2007. Who Is My Neighbour? Ethics Under Duress. In Imaginary Neighbours: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, ed. Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska, 275–300. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

CHAPTER 4

Aftermath’s Cinematic Séance: Anamorphosis, Spectrality and Sentient Matter

The opening minutes of Aftermath (Pasikowski 2012) chart the return of Franek Kalina from Chicago to the small, rural town of his birth in Poland, to reunite with his brother, Józef. As he walks along a road next to the forest, he senses something in the trees. Before he moves amongst them to investigate, the camera approximates the position of the ‘thing’: through branches and leaves, the hand-held camera shows us Franek standing on the path (see Fig. 2.4). As he moves into the forest, the scene cuts between frontal views of Franek, hand-held camera shots from within the trees, and close-ups of the back of his head, which suggest a stalking and voyeuristic presence hovering near him. Meanwhile, we can hear trees creaking unnaturally loudly, twigs breaking, and whisperings or loud breathing, accompanied by a score of extended high-pitched notes. There seems to be a spectral presence here that is both material (snapping sticks, drawing breath), and immaterial (invisible), what Derrida has called ‘a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit […] some “thing” that remains difficult to name’ (1994, 5). What haunts the seemingly ordinary rural environment of Aftermath? Franek will eventually discover that the town’s Jewish residents were massacred in WWII by the Catholic residents, and that his own father was the main perpetrator. The victims’ remains are discovered at the heart of the Kalinas’ ancestral home, and they are exhumed, reburied and mourned. The narrative might thus appear to adhere to the framework of a © The Author(s) 2020 M. Mroz, Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7_4

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traditional ghost story, one increasingly familiar across Eastern Europe, where violent pasts are often expressed via the general principles of the Freudian uncanny and return of the repressed (Etkind 2013, 18–19). This chapter, however, will shift away from the idea that the unmourned Jewish dead are haunting the landscape, while nevertheless proposing that multiple hauntings are activated in and through the film’s unfolding. In this chapter, haunting will be considered as the persistence of what Dziuban, drawing on Derrida and Avery Gordon, has called ‘unacknowledged continuities’ between past and present (Dziuban 2019b, 133). What remains from the past is not an ephemeral trace, memory or trauma, but more concretely a structure of violence and surveillance. The material/immaterial ‘look’ that pursues Franek at the film’s opening indexes, in part, the sprawling, active ‘gaze of the neighbour’ that presided over wartime perpetration and continues to operate now. Haunting is multiple and contradictory, and this chapter will trace some of the multiplicities conjured through the experience of viewing Aftermath. The chapter will pursue Derrida’s enticing suggestion that spectrality and psychoanalysis intersect at the cinema; film viewers, he states in interview, ‘go to the movies to be analysed, by letting all the ghosts appear and speak’ (de Baecque and Jousse 2015, 27). Crucially, for Derrida, the spectral presence is one that looks back at its haunted subject before and beyond their awareness of this look. This configuration of seeing and not seeing as a structure and a process can productively be thought in dialogue with the concept of anamorphosis. In Chap. 2, I considered how this concept has been discussed in relation to the stain that appears in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. The stain, or blur, indicates the point at which the viewing subject is already included in the image, which appears to look back at them and undermine their presumed mastery over what they see. Despite the different traditions of thought that underpin Derridean spectrality and Lacanian anamorphosis, this chapter will create a crossroads where these concepts might be made to, as it were, look back at each other.1 I will mobilise anamorphosis alongside the asymmetrical structure of spectral looking to outline a network of images and objects that seem to carry an injunction to look differently, or awry, at both the present and the past. Unlike the controlling ‘gaze of the neighbour’, this assemblage of looks has the potential to be ethically and politically expansive, not only for characters within the film, but also for the viewer, who is interpolated into Aftermath’s networks of looking. In tracing the ‘look back’ of seemingly sentient forms, the chapter will return to the image of the

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repurposed Jewish gravestone, as discussed in Chap. 2, where I considered Baksik’s photographs of embedded matzeva fragments as an echo of the structure of anamorphosis. Anamorphosis and spectrality open out towards radical otherness, plunging us into epistemological uncertainty, and undermining conventional ties between what we see and what we know. At the same time, they offer the possibility of reasserting a clarity of vision and knowledge: perhaps ghosts can be exorcised with the proper rituals, and the enigma of the stain in the image solved. These oscillations characterise Aftermath as a whole. The film deploys an understanding of archival and material evidence as revelatory. It sets up historical evidence, and history itself, as something waiting to be discovered. At the same time, it draws attention to its own continual process of framing this history. Aftermath utilises familiar generic and religious structures and symbols, but also deconstructs and distorts them, draining them of the meanings they have held as building blocks of Polish self-definition (Żukowski 2017, 342; see also Janicka 2018, 32). Conjured at the film’s opening, the operation of the spectral proves contagious, coursing through the film’s images, which become heterogeneous and unruly.

Unacknowledged Continuities Pasikowski has stated that Aftermath emerged from the ‘powerful emotion’ of ‘shame’ at uncovering ‘in our Polish, pure, wonderful house a skeleton in the closet’ (Sadowska 2012a). This moment of shameful discovery has its echo in Aftermath, as the brothers excavate the bones of the massacre victims from their father’s ruined house, and discover the crime that lies at the very centre, as it were, of their own heritage. To reiterate what I suggested in Chap. 1, a consistent element of post-millennial cinematic engagements with Polish-led atrocities is not the staging of the historical murders but the processes of coming-to-know these histories. This is precisely where Aftermath situates itself: at the turn of the millennium, and thus just at the moment of ‘narrative shock’ (Zubrzycki 2013) that Jan Gross’s Neighbours initiated in Poland. Epistemological shocks proliferate within the film itself as characters are progressively confronted with fragments of unwanted knowledge of Polish violence: first, the brothers learn that their house is not theirs, then that it was taken from the murdered Jewish owners, then that these people are buried in the

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foundations of their ancestral home, and finally that their own father was a perpetrator. In the book’s opening chapters, I described how the moment of coming-­to-know the histories of Polish crimes is frequently framed in public discourse in a particular way: as the sudden appearance of a ‘skeleton’ or a stain that has always been there, waiting for us to engage with it. When it emerges, this ‘thing’ undermines, and forces us to re-assess, what we thought was true about Polish history, memory, landscape, and identity. In other words, it makes us look at the present and the past differently. Such formulations powerfully resonate with the vocabulary of anamorphosis, which also involves the sudden awareness that something in the visual field, which initially appears only as a stain or blur, has always been ‘looking back’ at us. Pasikowski has proffered a similar structuring of experience in Aftermath’s marketing material. In the booklet accompanying the 2012 DVD release, he notes that uncovering the crime in the film ‘forces us to re-verify our previous judgements’ and to ‘look differently’ at Polish history, ‘family inheritance’, the countryside, and the nation.2 In fact, one’s ‘inheritance’ turns out to be a violent appropriation, founded on murder. Pasikowski’s statement emphasises that it is not just history that must be re-evaluated but also the contemporary state of the country. For Derrida, too, haunting is not only or necessarily about ‘the past’, but is fundamentally concerned with addressing present and future injustice: ‘if I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritances, and generations […] it is in the name of justice’ for those who are not present, and for those who are ‘not yet there’ (1994, xix). As Dziuban has pointed out, when considering haunting in the ‘thoroughly political’ way that Derrida does, we can see how haunting is a question of and for the present, and not only or necessarily a reminder of the lost world of the (un)dead (2019a, 10). Haunting persists because the violent and oppressive conditions that produced spectrality in the first place ‘continue to live on’ (Dziuban 2019b, 174). In the specific post-Jedwabne context, Dziuban considers how haunting might indicate the ‘unacknowledged continuity, the persistent presence of frames and sensibilities, the lingering power structures between the Poles and the Jews, both living and dead’ (2019b, 174–175). Aftermath is not a film about the supernatural; the events it treats are concretely of our world and related to our time (Janicka 2018, 80). The film’s haunting suggests that the ‘trouble’ indicated by spectrality ‘remains unacknowledged, invisibilised, or denied’, to use Dziuban’s

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words (2019b, 174). Haunting in Aftermath is produced through these unacknowledged continuities, something that ‘lives on’ in the continued mechanisms of violence and exclusion in the present. In this context, it is fascinating to note how some of the mechanisms of discrimination depicted within the film also seemed to ‘live on’ outside of it, in a spectral deconstruction of ‘the time-honoured distinctions between inside and outside (as in inside and outside the movie theatre), between […] character and spectator, cinema and world’ (Cholodenko 2004, 102). Where Franek, towards the end of Aftermath, predicts that news of the wartime pogrom would now ‘resound around the world’, the film’s participants were attacked for suggesting to audiences abroad that Poles participated in the Holocaust (Nowicka 2015, 198). Actor Maciej Stuhr was, like his character Józef, subject to anti-Semitic verbal attacks and death threats when he came to the film’s defence. While Józef is killed in the film, Stuhr was, according to Forecki, ‘verbally lynched’ outside of it (2013b, 227).3 Both actor and character became ‘symbolic Jews’ (neither the fictional Kalinas nor Stuhr are Jewish). As I explained in Chap. 1, ‘symbolic Jews’ are, to put it briefly, those who do not adhere to a particular (conservative and nationalist) vision of Polishness (Zubrzycki 2006, 148).

Cinematografts The incidents mentioned above suggest a blurring of the diegetic and the non-diegetic. They might make us consider, alongside Derrida and Castricano, ‘what are the borderlines of a text? How do they come about?’ (Castricano 2001, 97). Castricano, admittedly, is more interested in the permeable boundaries between texts, rather than between a text and the non-diegetic realm. Following Derrida, she characterises intertextual and trans-generic borrowings as a kind of haunting (97). There are a number of ways in which Derrida has configured the operation of spectrality through cinematic ‘texts’ specifically. As discussed in Chap. 2, Derrida considered the cinema to be ‘thoroughly spectral’ in structure (de Baecque and Jousse 2015, 26). For Derrida, cinema ‘generates a series of ghosts and spectral relations’ in its very processes of inscription (Cahill and Holland 2015, 11). Filmmakers may ‘stage phantomality almost head-on’ in projecting characters haunted by history, but spectrality is inherent in the very process of viewing itself (de Baecque and Jousse 2015, 26). Derrida refers to layers of spectrality as ‘grafts’: cinema ‘allows one to cultivate what could be called “grafts” of spectrality; it inscribes traces of

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ghosts on a general framework, the projected film, which is itself a ghost’ (de Baecque and Jousse 2015, 27). Cahill and Holland develop the term ‘cinematograft’ to describe the multiple layerings inherent in the film’s ‘phantom body’ (2015, 12). This process of grafting might equally describe the function of intertextuality, to return to Castricano’s point, allowing us to consider how texts become haunted by other texts that live on within them. In this section, I want to consider how, weaving together frameworks and motifs from a number of different genres, and drawing on iconic images in unexpected and potentially destabilising ways, the borderlines of Aftermath as a text are opened up. The film’s grafting of other texts, genres and symbolic frameworks, which proliferate within it, render it a haunted film, opening outwards to a possession by other works. As was often noted upon its release, Aftermath draws heavily on the language and generic frameworks of popular culture (see, for example, Graff 2012). The film was marketed as a thriller, a genre that Pasikowski was already well-known for in Poland, and which has been considered his preferred way of dealing with contemporary Polish issues (Sadowska 2012b).4 The film also gestures towards a number of other genres: the Gothic (in the crumbling ruins at the heart of which lies a terrible and repressed secret; in the fog and mist that swirls through the night-time scenes), the biblical (in the sins of the father visited upon the sons), and the Western (in the ‘outsider’s’ pursuit of justice in a small town).5 One can also map much of Aftermath’s plot across the structural framework of the folk tale, as delineated, for example, by Vladimir Propp: the hero (Franek) sets forth on a quest to attain the knowledge he lacks; along the way he is tested and attacked by ‘hostile creature[s]’ (the town’s residents) (Propp 1968, 42). The hero locates the object of his quest in a ‘different kingdom’ (the ruins of the father’s house, which lie in swamp land), and must ‘unlock’ whatever contains the object of the search (the earth that reveals the bones) (Propp 1968, 50, 54). A crucial figure in folk tale is the ‘helper’ who is ‘encountered accidentally, most often in the forest’, and assists in the unravelling of the mystery (Propp 1968, 84). Franek’s helper in Aftermath is an elderly woman (listed in the credits as a herbalist) who reveals to the brothers that the Poles murdered the town’s Jewish residents. She emerges from the forest holding a staff and dressed in rags like a ‘wise woman narrator’ of folklore (Warner 1995, 21) (see Fig. 2.3). As noted in Chap. 2, Aftermath also ‘grafts’ the investigative structure of crime fiction which is, in fact, not dissimilar to the structure of the folk

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tale. Both often revolve around quests for knowledge and objects while negotiating false paths and leads. As Langford has noted, generic frameworks, particularly through their use of binary oppositions and reversals, have a way of ‘ordering the world’ that tends to be reassuring for audiences, suggesting to them, through a circular logic, ‘that the world is, indeed, orderable’ (Langford 2005, 265). Any one of the generic frameworks conjured up by Aftermath, and followed to its conventional conclusion, might have provided this impression. Crime fiction, for example, is well-placed to provide audiences with a consolatory vision of a secure, stable and ‘knowable universe’ through narratives of mysteries solved, justice meted out, and restored order (Waligórska 2013, 144). In continually reaching for different generic frameworks and tropes, however, the film instead gives the impression of attempting to find the right language through which to narrativise and give meaning to the unwanted knowledge of Polish perpetration. The effect of these multiple evocations is arguably one of dissonance rather than security and stability.6 A similar effect can be seen in the film’s grafting of martyrological images and myths. Aftermath communicates not only in the language of folklore and popular culture, but also in the vocabulary of Christian martyrology.7 For example, as the brothers remove human remains from the earth, they pronounce Catholic prayers, and thus situate the extraction of the remains within a religious framework of meaning and value. Cross-­ cutting suggests that at the very moment that the remains emerge, the town’s older priest is dying from a heart attack. The force of the crime’s emergence is in this way written across the body of the film’s most significant Catholic personage, as though metonymically registering the ‘narrative shock’ of Polish crimes across the Catholic community (and across a literal and figurative ‘body’). It seems that, while the brothers attempt to give meaning to this moment through prayer, embedding the emergence of the bones within a Christian framework of consolation, the film’s form quite explicitly attempts to inscribe the event with meaning through its parallel editing. The cross-cutting enacts the search for an aesthetic through which to express the ‘shock’ of the knowledge, at the same time as the brothers are performing an analogous task through prayer. When Józef learns that it was his own father who instigated the murders of the Jewish residents, he wants to rebury the bones and cover up the crime again. Franek disagrees, the brothers fight, and Franek departs. He is quickly called back to a grisly spectacle: Józef has been crucified on the

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Fig. 4.1  Józef’s crucified body displayed for diegetic and non-diegetic bystanders in Aftermath

door of his barn (Fig.  4.1).8 This very specific way of killing someone seems divorced from narrative logic; no perpetrator is identified by the film, and there is no question of investigating his murder. Instead, Józef’s body metamorphoses into the most potent visual symbol of Catholic Poland, one that has for centuries signified Poland’s status as the dying and rising ‘martyr of nations’ (Zubrzycki 2006, 27). Crucifixion is closely associated with hope and renewal (Zubrzycki 2006, 28), and Józef’s crucifixion may seem reassuring: the son has redeemed the sins of the father. At the same time, however, the crucifixion in Aftermath indexes not so much Polish martyrdom as Polish perpetration. While the accusation that Jewish people crucified Jesus is a common anti-Semitic ‘pogrom cry’ (Tokarska-Bakir 2019), here, it is the Poles who are implicated in the death of the ‘symbolic Jew’ Józef. The image of the crucifixion is stripped of its aura and emptied of its usual meaning. Instead, we are made to see the ritual violence, usually repressed and ignored, that lies behind the symbol (Żukowski 2017, 345; Janicka 2018, 26). It is striking how Józef’s body is also presented self-consciously as an image; this violence ‘makes an image of itself’, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s words (2005, 20).9 The crucified body becomes an image both for the diegetic bystanders, who, en masse, gather and stare at it, and for the viewer. Our first view of Józef’s body is from an extremely high-angle perspective, before the barn door opens as though in a gesture of unveiling. If the crucified body generally functions to some extent as a cliché, that is, ‘a form of cultural shorthand that facilitates and eases assimilation without critical thought’, then the film here

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shows us the cliché malfunctioning, making us aware of what it usually conceals from us (Backman Rogers 2019, 27). As well as grafting generic frameworks and iconic images in disruptive ways, Aftermath also ‘cites’ a number of earlier films concerned with Polish victimisation of their Jewish neighbours.10 As I noted in Chap. 1, Birthplace (Łoziński 1992)  has had a powerful resonance in the post-­ Jedwabne climate. Aftermath conjures Birthplace from its opening scene. Both films begin with images of a LOT Polish Airlines plane landing, carrying protagonists from America who will investigate the fate of the Jewish villagers around their rural birth place.11 These investigations will be full of obstacles, from the amnesia (real or feigned) and fear of the local residents, to the violent aggression of the younger generations towards prying ‘strangers’. The scene in Aftermath in which Franek confronts an elderly resident and is violently threatened by his grandson was intended, according to Pasikowski, as a homage to the scene in Birthplace in which Grynberg encounters the family of his father’s killer (Sadowska 2012a). One can also find a powerful echo of Łoziński’s film in the scene of the brothers’ excavation of the bones of the Jewish inhabitants. In Birthplace, Grynberg brings himself face-to-face with the skull of his father, which is mimicked by Franek’s similar gesture in Aftermath as he holds up the skull of one of the Jewish victims. These scenes and moments from Birthplace and Aftermath then resonate beyond the boundaries of both films and become echoed in Ida (Pawlikowski 2013), which is discussed in Chap. 5. Marian Marzynski’s documentary Shtetl (USA, 1996), which follows the return of Nathan Caplan from America to the small town of his birth in Poland, is also cited in Aftermath. Similar scenes of travel can be found near the film’s beginning, as Marzynski and Caplan journey from the airport on trains and buses to the town of Brańsk. Caplan is assisted in his investigation of the town’s Jewish past by the local historian Zbigniew Romaniuk. Like his cinematic incarnation Józef, Romaniuk removes Jewish gravestones that have been used as paving material and whetstones, and creates a lapidarium on the site of the former Jewish cemetery. As Józef will, Romaniuk has learned some Hebrew in order to decode the matzevot. These gravestones, Marzynski states in voice-over, ‘are alive’. The matzevot are here positioned as radiating a sentience, one that seems to spread outwards from within this film to possess Aftermath’s own gravestones. Like Józef and Franek, too, Romaniuk becomes subject to abuse due to his interest in Jewish history, and his walls are daubed with anti-Semitic graffiti. Both Birthplace and Shtetl show the continuing

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operation of violence and exclusion in their depicted communities, and Aftermath, in drawing on these films, suggests that their visions of anti-­ Semitism continue to be relevant today. Pasikowski’s intertextuality thus indicates the unacknowledged continuities between past and present, and enacts what Janicka (2018, 4) calls a process of ‘recapitulation’, a reminder of lessons that we have still not learned and processes of victimisation that we have still not seen.

Time Out of Joint Aftermath’s cinematografts indicate the persistence of the past as it lives on into the present. This temporal continuity is, in fact, the first thing that Franek notices when he arrives in his former home: ‘nothing has changed’, he says to his brother. At the police station, the eagle emblem (the Polish national symbol) is missing its crown, thus appearing as it would have under state socialism. Anachronisms, such as the brothers’ old-fashioned lanterns, abound in the mise-en-scene. One could, perhaps, interpret this as a representation of a ‘backwardness’ persisting in Polish rural spaces around the millennium. More powerfully, however, it suggests the operation of a time ‘out of joint’. This line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, spoken by the eponymous hero in response to the (re)appearance of his dead father as a spectre, takes on particular significance for Derrida in his delineation of the temporality of haunting: ‘“the time is out of joint”: time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged […] deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges, time is off course’ (1994, 20). The time of haunting is not one where the present passes, not a ‘chain of presents, day after day’, but rather a time of repetition and return: the spectral is what ‘begins by coming back’ (1994, 4, 11). In Aftermath, the past has not really passed; it continually snags on the present and governs the relationships between the town’s residents and their ‘others’. These ‘others’ were once Jewish Poles. In their absence, those who align themselves with the Jewish past, like Józef and Franek, come to occupy their place as ‘others’ in the system of exclusion and violence. The collective mentality that facilitated the wartime pogrom continues to operate in the town, as the residents’ behaviour is often marked by barely concealed hatred, violent anti-Semitism and extreme aggression. While we see several instances of the brothers being harassed, many of the attacks do not have visible agents behind them; we don’t see who throws a rock through their window, kills their dog, vandalises their farm, or sets

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their field on fire. The effect of this disconnection of action from perpetrator is that the entire town seems implicated in the violence, a violence that indicates the powerful continuity operating between now and then. The town’s residents and farmers, most frequently presented as a group rather than as individuals, embody a terrifying mass mentality. When the brothers dig up the matzevot from the churchyard in the middle of the night, the group suddenly appears in an impossible manner: one second the space is empty, and the next it is full of people soundlessly holding up pitchforks in the dark, as though past violence was about to repeat itself. In an uncanny, and unwitting, echo of the murderous actions of his father, Józef initially ‘greets’ his surprise guest Franek with an axe. Józef, it transpires, is wary of the attacks, which grow increasingly anti-Semitic in character as the film progresses. Józef’s farm buildings are spray-painted with anti-Semitic graffiti in German (‘Jude’) and Russian (‘z˙ydki won’, meaning ‘Jews piss off’), words summoned from the war era. When the Kalina field is set alight and the brothers fight with the local firemen who refuse to tend to it, the bystanders gathered around them shout ‘beat the Jews!’. Past anti-­ Semitism continues to haunt the construction of present ‘otherness’. While past violence manifests itself in the collective actions of the town’s present inhabitants, Franek cannot initially find anyone who is willing to discuss it. The oldest residents either claim not to remember or refuse to talk. The town appears to work collectively to keep the atrocity hidden. After the brothers dig up the bones, however, they finally locate the elderly Malinowski, who alongside their father was the main perpetrator of the crime. Impassioned, Malinowski relates how on the day of the massacre their father murdered a Jewish woman who had, before the war, rejected his advances. Malinowski not only tells this story, however, he violently performs it, miming the grabbing of the woman’s hair, the smashing of her head against the ground, and her cries of ‘mama, mama!’ in a high-­ pitched voice. Malinowski himself may not have committed this murder, but as an instigator of the pogrom he is certainly implicated in it. His dramatisation is thus a kind of re-enactment and, although occurring in a fictional film, is reminiscent of the growing number of documentaries in which perpetrators re-stage their past crimes. Margulies uses the language of haunting to describe such re-enacting perpetrators as ‘possessed’ and the temporality of re-enactment as ‘disjointed’ (2019, 190). For Rancière, the perpetrator’s ‘reconstruction is unquestionably an intolerable spectacle, as if yesterday’s torturer were ready to adopt the same role tomorrow’

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(2009, 101).12 In Aftermath, both the woman’s dying words and Kalina’s actions seem to be ventriloquised through Malinowski, as the atrocity, like a disturbing revenant, is re-enacted through the body and voice of the man in the present.

Dislocating and Relocating: Archives and Archaeology In his discussion of temporalities out of joint, Derrida’s use of spatial terminology is striking. In defining the phrase ‘time out of joint’, Derrida argues that: the perversion of that which, out of joint, does not work well, does not walk straight, or goes askew […] can easily be seen to oppose itself as does the oblique, twisted, wrong and crooked to the good direction of that which goes, right, straight, to the spirit of that which orients or founds the law [le droit]—and sets off directly, without detour, toward the right address. (1994, 20)

Hamlet, Derrida continues, opposes the ‘being “out-of-joint” of time to its being-right, in the right or the straight path of that which walks upright’, and ‘curses the fate that would have caused him to be born to set right a time that walks crooked’ (1994, 20). In Aftermath’s spatial dynamics, however, the straight road and the local legal and administrative systems (‘the law’) are initially associated with the repression of the truth by the dominant majority. The film informs us that the land reforms following WWII retrospectively legalised the Polish appropriation of Jewish property in the town. This further encouraged a shroud of silence to be drawn over the murders which, of course, paved the way for the property acquisitions in the first place. Meanwhile, roads, yards and outhouses were paved with Jewish gravestones, in a defilement of burial custom. The straight road and the law in their own ways covered over past violence. It is not coincidental, then, that Józef initially gets into trouble with the law for destroying a road, while throughout the film, Franek is followed and intimidated on the road by anonymous people in a car. The town residents dominate these straight roads and legal institutions. By contrast, the brothers are continually drawn off-road, to environments that function as marginal in relation to the administrative and social centre of small-town life. As already noted, Franek’s first action upon his

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Fig. 4.2  Aftermath: the ruined ancestral home as posthumous environment

return to the provinces (to which he has travelled on a series of runways, tracks and highways) is to leave the road and penetrate the winding forest paths. The ‘old’ road that Józef has destroyed, which only reveals its secret once it is no longer usable, is initially accessed by Franek through a dense thicket. The old farmhouse, and site of the mass grave, can only be reached through a forested and flooded area (Fig. 4.2). The ruins of the house, and the earth beneath it, constitute a particular kind of posthumous environment, which Sendyka (2013) has termed a ‘non-site of memory’, a burial ground unmarked by human commemoration. Such environments can also be read through a philosophy of waste: they are ‘redundant, obsolete or discarded’, ‘out of joint with the time of human activity’ (Viney 2014, 15, 19. Chapter 6 will return to waste theory). They function as spaces both literally difficult to access, and figuratively impassable, for few will speak of the horrific events that have taken place in them. In writing about marginalised sites as spaces of temporal dislocation, Viney’s vocabulary draws on Derridean hauntology. Ruins in particular are commonly thought to be sites ‘out of joint’. As Viney notes, ‘by signalling a quasi-absent past, ruins appeal to a conception of temporality that is replete with a time of retentions, protentions and disruptions’ (2014, 139). It is, of course, in the ruins of the Kalina farmhouse that the remains of the Jewish residents are excavated and where the film’s witness testifies to the atrocity of the past; it is there that we are plunged into ‘an environment of competing and commingled tenses’ (Viney 2014, 140). The exclusionary structures of the past persist; the ‘herbalist’, the only person willing to break the silence around the crime, exists in a space marginal to

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the community, in exile in the forest. She emerges at dawn as the brothers are resting near the large pile of bones that they have unearthed from their father’s ruined house and describes how the Jewish residents were herded into the house and set alight by their laughing Polish neighbours (see Fig. 2.3). Everyone participated in this crime, she states. When the woman, then a young child, protested, the perpetrators threatened to cast her into the fire. The herbalist’s role in the film is very brief—it is only to deliver this testimony—but extremely important. She is the only figure who can function as a true ‘eyewitness’; the rest of the community is compromised by their participation in both the crime and its cover-up. The herbalist is played by one of Poland’s most famous and beloved actresses, Danuta Szaflarska, who initially attracted attention for her role as a member of the Polish resistance against German occupation in Zakazane Piosenki/ Forbidden Songs (Leonard Buczkowski, Poland, 1947). This early post-­ war period was a time when the narrative of Polish ‘witnessing’ was gaining strength. Her appearance in Aftermath as the film’s ‘witness’ is thus fitting, but also pointed: there is no room for her in the town’s social structure, and no room for the mode of witnessing that she embodies. One wonders, too, whether her stylised appearance as a character from folklore indicates a certain critique of the figure of the witness as it was idealised in Polish discourse, as though the film were suggesting that such figures were as mythical as the forest-dwelling crone of fairytale. Józef’s symbolic Jewish cemetery, with its dilapidated and dislocated stones in the middle of an otherwise ordinary wheat field, is also a site of the temporally disjointed and spatially askew (see Fig. 2.2). Commenting on photographs of ruined matzevot in functioning Polish farmyards, Cohn (2015, 212) has described the ‘out-of-time-sensation’ such images produce. The photographs he refers to were taken by Monika Krajewska and collected in a volume entitled Time of Stones (1983). In her introduction to the volume, Anna Kamieńska (1983) writes that the tombstones, pulled down, their epitaphs blurred out, speak of the extermination of a people. Here is a tribe of stones, a people of stones, an obstinate tribe which is ever marching and ever shouting and calling voicelessly.

Kamieńska utilises a striking vocabulary of agency: the stones speak and march. Aftermath’s marketing material, too, referred to the matzevot as ‘the stones that shout.’13 The gravestones are figured as sentient, and the brothers become the mediators of the stones’ address. In one particularly

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Figs. 4.3 and 4.4  Reading and touching archival matter in Aftermath

resonant scene, Józef is shown cleaning the dirt from newly ‘planted’ gravestones in his field, while Franek visits the municipal archives to inquire about their father’s land. Through a series of parallel edits, the film cuts between Józef reading the Hebrew writing on the gravestones, and Franek reading the pertinent records brought to him by the archivist (Figs. 4.3 and 4.4). As Franek’s finger traces the record to connect a plot of land with the name ‘Wimelman, Awraham’, the film cuts to Józef who is also using his hands to expose the words ‘Itzhak Akiwa, son of Reb Awraham Wimelman’. Franek reads the name ‘Szymon Hirshbaim’, and the film cuts to Józef reading from the tombstone: ‘Szymeon. Son of Benjamin Zelig, in blessed remembrance, Hirshbaim’. In this highly choreographed montage sequence, the archival material and the stones are read together as sources of historical knowledge in a

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moment of dramatic revelation. The film is unequivocal about the ‘truthfulness’ of the history that is emerging. Locating archival records, the film suggests, ensures an accurate representation of the past by providing us with an assemblage of ‘signs that can be put together into a coherent narrative’, to use Guruianu and Andrievskikh’s words on archival material (2019, 75). There are echoes here of how archival documents concerning Polish perpetration have been framed in recent discussion: as having always been present, but not utilised (see Chap. 1 and Chap. 2). Franek’s moment of clarity echoes Gross’s in the opening pages of Neighbours: ‘once we realise that what seems inconceivable is precisely what happened, a historian soon discovers that the whole story is very well documented, that witnesses are still alive, and that the memory of this crime has been preserved in Jedwabne through the generations’ (2003, 22). In Aftermath’s faith in archival material there is little recognition that, as Derrida reminds us, events are produced rather than simply recorded through archival practices (1995, 17).14 Didi-Huberman (2008, 99) has written that ‘the archive is by no means the pure and simple “reflection” of the event, nor its pure and simple “evidence”. For it must always be developed by repeated cross-checkings and by montage with other archives.’ In Aftermath, the archive is constructed as the reflection of the event, and the cinematic cross-cutting or montage serves to underscore what is already presented as ‘evidence’. The grave markers, too, are set up in this way. They are framed as material forms that can be unproblematically read, decoded, and deployed as definitive evidence; they can be grasped, physically and epistemologically. In the choreographed cross-­ cutting, then, we find the archives and the tombstones speaking together through the bodies of Franek and Józef as they read and touch archival material. Not unlike Hamlet in this regard, the brothers find themselves working to uncover knowledge and ‘put a dislocated time back on its hinges’ (Derrida 1994, 20). Through the parallel editing, moments in time and space (at the archives and at the lapidarium) become like tracks that are finally lining up in perfect symmetry, parallel paths that prefigure the ‘setting right’ of the town’s crime, the joining back together of the disjointed time of haunting. The brothers’ desire to straighten up the obscure and confused thus finds further symmetry in the film’s form; the process of wrenching a historical truth from its place of burial in archives is visibilised and enacted. This faith in the archival also extends to the film’s vision of the earth as a kind of archive, from which one can extract evidence of the historic

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crime. The exhumation scene, too, is part of a sequence of parallel editing, as afore-mentioned; it is cut with the priest’s death as though visibilising the shock of the emergence of the unwanted knowledge embodied by the bones. In this sequence, Franek’s gesture of bringing himself face-to-face with the skull of a Jewish victim recalls Grynberg’s similar action in Birthplace. In Łoziński’s film, however, the discovery of the bones seemed to stop the film in its tracks. Here, we have a different vision of excavation, one that, to adopt Whittaker’s definition, produces revelatory evidence that will allow us to assemble coherent histories from decayed matter (Whittaker 2014, 328). The film reframes the earth as a material archive producing definitive knowledge, and sidelines the ‘inherently partial, fragmentary and therefore uncanny nature of the archaeological record’ (González-Ruibal cited by Whittaker 2014, 328). In the posthumous ecology forged by Aftermath’s form and narrative, the earth, the matzevot and the archive seem to yield the evidence that the brothers seek.

Haunted Subjects In holding up the skull, Franek’s gesture also recalls Hamlet.15 Derrida notes that Hamlet, as a righter of wrongs, belongs to that ‘second generation, originarily late and therefore destined to inherit. One never inherits without coming to terms with [s’expliquer avec] some spectre’ (Derrida 1994, 21). In both Hamlet and Aftermath, the death of the father forces a troubled legacy upon the son(s). In Hamlet, however, the spectral father is the victim who charges his son with setting things right, while in Aftermath the father is the perpetrator, whose unacknowledged crime continues to live on into the present. In their interest in Jewish history, the brothers may appear to be working against their father’s wish, which, if it is in line with the community in general, we can presume involved remaining silent about the Jewish past. This section will seek to complicate this picture in tracing further modes of haunting in the film, and explicating multiple, often incompatible, spectral injunctions. While the two brothers work together as mediators of the historical truth, as described above, they have different relationships with the spectral. For Gordon, haunting occurs ‘when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view […] spectres or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view’ (2008, xvi). It is not only the traces of Jewish presence that indicate Aftermath’s blind spot, but more significantly the Polish

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Catholic violence that removed these Jewish citizens from view, and the material benefits that accrued from this action. Józef initially plays an active role in visibilising this violence through his matzevot collection. When arranged as paving slabs on the road and around the church, the matzevot were trampled daily underfoot; not only were the stones no longer seen, but the residents were constantly perpetuating acts of desecration. Józef’s collection of these grave markers, and the embedding of them in his field, is an action with immense figurative resonance. He restores a lost Jewish cemetery to vision and plants the stone slabs in a space that has symbolic value for Polish self-identity: a wheat field, passed down from their mother, and thus literally a mother(s)land (Janicka 2018, 10). In echoing the actions and traits of Shtetl’s Romaniuk, Józef is already an intertextually haunted subject. Near the beginning of the film, in discussing Józef’s lapidarium, Franek asks him: ‘why do you, of all people, care about dead strangers?’ Józef replies, ‘because…they have no one left alive to do it themselves’. In this exchange, Józef’s actions appear to be framed in the terminology of Derridean haunting: he acts in the name of justice for those who are not there (1994, xix). However, Józef’s sense of justice is delimited. His fascination with the gravestones is so absorbing that it seems to leave little room for other enquiries, and he shows less interest in Franek’s investigation into where the Jewish people themselves might have ‘disappeared’ to during the war. Once the brothers locate the bones and discover that their father was the main perpetrator, Józef wants to re-bury the matter (physically, and figuratively). He wants to keep the secret. As a haunted subject, Józef’s actions recall the work of psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, whose writing on the crypt and the phantom is, as Davis (2007, 9) writes, a little acknowledged source of Derrida’s hauntology.16 Abraham and Torok were interested in transgenerational communication, and particularly the transmission of the ‘undisclosed’ secrets of previous generations, which ‘disturb the lives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about their distant causes’ (Davis 2007, 9–10). In their notion of the crypt within the subject, ‘constructed to preserve loved ones from being radically lost in death’, the patient becomes a repository of the dead ancestor, a ‘cryptophore’ (Davis 2007, 77). This process of ‘parasitic inclusion’ is carried out unbeknownst to the subject (Derrida 1986, xvi, xvii). Thus, for Abraham and Torok, as Rand notes, ‘the dead do not return, but their lives’ unfinished business is unconsciously handed down to their descendants’ (Rand 1994, 167),

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particularly where ‘unspeakable’ secrets have been taken with them to the grave. ‘What haunts’, Abraham writes, ‘are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others’ (Abraham and Torok 1994, 171). Rather than returning to reveal a secret, the phantom of the ancestor wants to prevent its shameful secrets from coming to light. Hamlet, that ur-text of haunting, is thus incomplete in Abraham’s thought, and the psychoanalyst added a sixth act to the play that reveals that Hamlet’s father was himself the perpetrator of a murder, one he wishes to draw attention away from in directing Hamlet towards investigating his own death. The spectral injunction of Hamlet’s father is thus a ‘subterfuge’ (Abraham and Torok 1994, 189), a ‘lure’ designed to mask another horrific crime (Davis 2007, 81). This is not then, the Freudian return of the repressed, but ‘disguised evidence of someone else’s shameful secret’ (Davis 2007, 79). Standing in front of the graves of their parents in the Catholic cemetery, Józef angrily asks his brother how Franek would explain to them why he didn’t attend their funeral. Franek briefly answers: ‘they’re dead’. Józef quickly responds with: ‘maybe for you’. Józef presents himself here as a kind of cryptophore, for whom the parents are not quite departed. His obsession with collecting, restoring and decoding the Jewish gravestones both uncannily touches upon and also covers over the deeper crime of his father. Józef’s lapidarium might have alienated him from some of the town’s inhabitants, yet in itself suggests nothing about the elder Kalina’s involvement in atrocity. Indeed, Józef’s drive to purchase matzevot from his neighbours at inflated prices allows some of them to continue to profit from Jewish property, as their antecedents did in the past by taking over Jewish land and farms. Józef encrypts his father’s crime. The phantom also haunts beyond individual or familial psychology, allowing us to consider how entire communities falsify or disregard the ‘shameful secrets’ of the past (Abraham and Torok 1994, 169). The film seems to suggest that multiple generations of Poles encrypt their antecedents’ past infamy, which makes it impossible to shatter the silence from within. Where Abraham and Torok envision an analyst helping the subject to pummel away at the walls of the crypt from outside, Aftermath gives us Franek, who may have been born in the town but is now operating as an external force, working against the community, his parents, and eventually his brother.17 It is, after all, Franek for whom a haunting disturbance initially manifests itself. The spectral presence in the landscape seems to be waiting for him, and because we share its perspective onto Franek via the hand-held camera, we know that it is there before he notices it. In Derrida’s Specters

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of Marx, the spectral is figured as a ‘thing that looks at us’ (1994, 5), but also more specifically as something that sees us even when we don’t see it: ‘this spectral someone other looks at us…even before and beyond any look on our part’ (1994, 6). The spectral presence is always already there. As the film continues, Franek and Józef will be continually watched, intimidated and attacked. At times, the diegetic human agents behind these attacks are shown or indicated, while at other times they are not. The film mobilises, instead, the powerful ‘gaze of the neighbour’, for which those observed (or those who feel themselves to be observed) must constantly fashion themselves (see Chap. 2). The hand-held camera shots also, however, become closely aligned with Franek’s own perspective, as he moves down dark corridors, into abandoned buildings, and through dense forests in the course of the film. This technique, familiar from thriller and horror films, creates suspense and is activated as part of the film’s generic framework. In thinking through hauntology, however, another possibility emerges: these moving, travelling shots, initially associated with a presence watching Franek, now also become associated with Franek’s own movements, as though the spectral were working through him. Franek thus goes furthest in opening himself up to the injunction of haunting. For Derrida, the spectral other’s demand is ultimately inexplicable; it follows ‘the structure of a type of secret’, and remains secret from me even as it commands me (Saghafi 2010, 52). There are, then, crucial differences between Abraham and Torok’s phantoms and Derrida’s deconstructive spectres.18 For Derrida, the concept of a ghost that misdirects us makes little sense, for ghosts do not ‘belong to the order of knowledge’, and lie outside of frameworks of ‘truth’ (Davis 2007, 84). Abraham and Torok, by contrast, believed that secrets buried inside the ‘cryptophore’ could be translated into knowledge, and ‘the guilt and shame attached to the secret’ could thus be exorcised (Davis 2007, 81). While I have identified Józef with the phantom that lures, and associated Franek with the inexplicable demand of the deconstructive ghost, we must now return to question these categorisations. For while Franek obeys the spectral injunction without knowing what he is doing, nor that it will lead right back to his own door, his quest precisely becomes one of gathering this knowledge and revealing the secret. In this way, Franek’s actions do end up echoing the trajectory of analysis as envisioned by Abraham and Torok, which moves from initial mystification to a ‘phase in which secrets are explained and the truth is restored’ (Davis 2007, 86). Derrida considered haunting to open us up to what is still to be understood, to provide ‘an insight into the

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limitations of what we currently know’ (Davis 2007, x). By contrast, within the scope of the film, Franek’s illumination of the town’s past might seem all-encompassing, leaving us with the impression that there is nothing else to be uncovered, an impression aided by the film’s definitive deployment of archaeological and archival ‘evidence’. However, we are far from finished with Derridean haunting, which itself is never finished, and this chapter will soon return to the question of whether, and if so how and for whom, the film might retain an openness to an inexplicable and ongoing spectral demand. First, however, I want to begin ‘grafting’ the question of spectral looking onto the concept of anamorphosis, that most potent formulation of the blind spot in the field of vision.

Blind Spots As outlined in Chap. 2, Holbein’s The Ambassadors presents viewers with two incommensurate perspectives: when viewed from front-on, a stain or blur is traced across the image of the two men, which becomes identifiable as a skull when viewed from the side. These perspectives carry particular ideological resonances. Looking front-on, everything seems to be displayed for our benefit, an illusion undercut by the emergence of the skull. Aftermath is not short of literal skulls emerging from an occluded visual field (or more precisely, from beneath layers of earth), and thus offers a visual rhyme with the skull that sticks out from Holbein’s painting. In tracing the operation of anamorphosis in the film, however, I will not be focusing on these actual skulls, but rather on Franek’s encounter with an image, specifically with anti-Semitic graffiti. Franek initially doesn’t understand Józef’s interest in the dead Jewish inhabitants, protesting, ‘but they are strangers to us! And very much so’. He expresses anti-Semitic statements on several occasions. Eventually, however (and somewhat reluctantly) Franek changes his perspective, and begins to see differently. To explicate this perspectival change, it is necessary to return to the first scene of rural haunting. As well as an entity that seems to watch Franek, there is something else that is lying in wait in this landscape. When Franek alights at the bus stop, a long-shot shows that the side of the shelter has been painted with a Star of David hanging from a gallows, with the words ‘Jews piss off’ written above it (Fig. 4.5). The graffiti is briefly visible in two shots. First, the image is seen in its entirety as the camera waits for the bus to pull up and Franek to alight, but the combination of the long-shot and the dull paint means that it is possible for the image to go unnoticed

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Fig. 4.5  Anti-Semitic graffiti as a stain in Aftermath’s rural landscape

by the viewer. Next, the graffiti is visible as a blurred fragment of white paint when Franek walks towards the bus stop. The camera does not pay close attention to it, and therefore we may not notice it. It elicits no reaction from Franek. Whether he fails to see it altogether or is simply accustomed to this type of graffiti is unclear.19 In any case, the graffiti is waiting here, an outward symptom of anti-Semitic violence. Before we realise the extent to which this community is marked by murder, and therefore the full weight of this image, we have here, figured in Franek’s blind spot, something within the environment that demands an address. We can think about the graffiti as akin to an ominous stain in an otherwise ‘innocent’ landscape, and place this in dialogue with Žižek’s adoption of the concept of anamorphosis for the cinema. Žižek describes a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) in which the hero, searching for the kidnappers of a diplomat, finds himself in idyllic countryside (Žižek 1991, 88). He becomes suddenly aware that one of the windmills is rotating in a different direction from all the others; after watching it with some consternation, he comes to the conclusion that the windmill is ‘signalling’ to a plane flying nearby. Žižek describes how ‘a perfectly “natural” and “familiar” situation’ becomes uncanny and threatening as soon as a detail that does not make any sense within the frame of the scene is added (88). What has previously been perceived as ordinary, he continues, suddenly acquires an air of ‘strangeness’. The ‘horror’ is not ‘placed outside, next to, the idyllic interior, but well within it, more precisely: under it, as its “repressed” underside’ (89, original emphasis). Like the stain in The Ambassadors, the windmill renders the rest of the image ‘suspicious’:

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‘The ground of the established, familiar signification opens up; we find ourselves in a realm of total ambiguity’ (91). The point of anamorphosis undermines our position as neutral or objective observers, as though we are already ‘inscribed in the observed scene—in a way, it is the point from which the picture itself looks back at us’ (Žižek 1991, 91). As Lukacher has pointed out, anamorphosis can be thought of as ‘Lacan’s figure for the way in which we “feel” seeing’ (cited by Kear 1999, 181). This sense of being looked at even when we do not see who looks at us evokes Derrida’s construction of the asymmetrical structure of spectral looking; the ghost ‘is not some wraith that we see coming and going but rather some one by whom we feel observed’ (Saghafi 2010, 55). When considering the still image of the Holbein painting, there is a temporal progression at work: we move (physically, across the room) from seeing the perspectival view, to the awry angle that reveals the skull. A time-based medium such as cinema can further dramatise anamorphosis in its temporal duration: it is not just a matter of a single image, but also of what comes before and after. In Aftermath, the perspectival image, what Silverman might call the ‘given to be seen’ (1996, 178), is initially evoked through the picturesque images of the rural landscape, framed through the windows of the vehicles travelled on by Franek. Rather than the static frame of a painting, we are provided with mobile framings that proceed in time. Buoyant fields of golden crops and green forests initially suggest life and productivity, a homecoming to a landscape worthy of a Polish epic (Żukowski 2018a, 93). The anti-Semitic graffiti visibilises the (barely) repressed underside of these iconic landscapes. It is an image of a murderous threat, a stain that is cinematically rendered as hidden in plain sight (as it is difficult to make out in the brief long-shot) and then as a blur through the lens of a moving camera. In this cinematic structuring of a blind spot within a field of vision, the innocuous landscape signals the violence at its heart. There is an important difference between this moment in Aftermath and Žižek’s account of Hitchcock’s film, however. For in the former, unlike in the latter, the protagonist within the film does not (yet) notice the ‘stain’. A discerning viewer, however, might. It is, then, the spectator, as much as the protagonist, who is being addressed and tested in this scene. It is we who are confronted with this image of murderous threat amongst innocuous rural life, plunged into ambiguity and addressed from within the film. Franek does not see the stain, then, although it, in a way, ‘sees’ him, is present before and beyond him. As the film continues, Franek becomes

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the driving force behind revealing the atrocity, and by the end of the film he has significantly shifted his position. His change in perspective resonates with the physical and perspectival movement of position required by The Ambassadors. When Franek returns to the bus stop near the film’s end, he most certainly sees the graffiti then: indeed, he attempts to destroy it with a few swift kicks.20 Yet we need to be wary of thinking about the point of anamorphosis as a kind of clue in an investigative process, or as simply a means to a conclusive end. As I outlined in Chap. 2, Dolar has pointed out how anamorphosis seems to convey the injunction to look for ‘the higher hidden meaning’ within what appears only to be a blur (2015, 136). However, he warns against assuming that we can decode the ultimate ‘meaning’ of the image by finally seeing or deciphering the stain (2015, 137). The sense that we have ‘straightened out the crooked lines’, as in ‘all good detective stories’, is illusory (2015, 137). His vocabulary echoes Aftermath’s investigative trajectory as well as Franek’s desire to straighten out or ‘set right’ what is spectrally convoluted and disjointed by haunting. Towards the end of Aftermath, it may seem that Franek’s investigation has ‘solved’ the mystery of the violent crime emblematised in the graffiti, and he can reinstate himself as a masterful subject over what he sees by literally destroying the image in front of him. This gesture, however, is ineffectual; he might destroy the physical image painted on wood but, like the stain, it is only ever a ‘stand-in’ (Dolar 2015, 130). What is left in place is the ‘torsion’ that made the stain possible. We can think of this torsion as, specifically, the structure and continuity of anti-Semitism in the town, and, more generally, the impossibility of ever ‘closing, delimiting or totalising’ the process of coming-to-know (Dolar 2015, 130). Ironically, while Franek is kicking through the image on the bus stop, a cut reveals that he is being watched by a busload of town residents. As ever, he is continually, unknowingly, under the neighbours’ gaze, and vandalising an image that seemed to look back at him is frustratingly futile.

‘The Stones That Shout’ For Lacan, the stain in the painting, which he also refers to as an ‘anamorphic ghost’ (1986, 89) shows that ‘as subjects, we are literally called into the picture, and represented here as caught’ (1986, 92). In Carnal Thoughts, Sobchack references the stain in The Ambassadors to explore how the inanimate things in the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski seem to ‘assert a signifying power and mysterious autonomy that emerge through

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the hyperbolic excess of ontic presence created by both the camera’s closeup framing of them and its hyperempirical detailing of their material presentness’ (2004, 91–92). For Sobchack, this sense that objects have an ‘oddly autonomous and intimidating claim on our attention’ can also be traced to Lacan’s encounter with a sardine can floating in the ocean, which seemed to look back at him, despite, of course, not possessing the sensory capacity to do so (2004, 92). In her gloss on this section of Lacan’s text, Sobchack emphasises that when an apparently sentient object seems to look back at us, it may encourage us to interpret it, but its ultimate significance is fundamentally elusive; such objects and images may refuse ‘human comprehension and reduction’ (2004, 93). Once again, I wish to stress the resonance between this explication of the look-back of objects drawn from psychoanalysis, and Derrida’s positioning of the spectral as something ‘before or beyond’ us, which addresses us with an ultimately inexplicable demand (Derrida 1994, 6). Although it is not calibrated around anamorphosis, the conjunction of spectrality, psychoanalysis and cinema takes up a large portion of Derrida’s otherwise sparse commentary on film. As mentioned above, he uses the term ‘séance’ to stress the overlaps between cinema, haunting and psychoanalysis; ‘psychoanalysis and cinema address a similar urge, compulsion or drive: a necessary meeting or session with ghosts’ (Cahill and Holland 2015, 7). Holland’s way of articulating this network of Derridean haunting, psychoanalysis and cinema echoes the vocabulary of anamorphosis: ‘both psychoanalysis and cinema uncovered or gave a stage to what often went unnoticed, to what was previously imperceptible, repressed, forgotten, or unconscious, but was there all along’ (Holland 2015, 53).21 It is not, then, just the Kalina brothers who are addressed within the film by the different networks of looking, spectral and otherwise, that the film summons. The film’s viewers, too, are incorporated into Aftermath’s cinematic séance as images seem to ‘look back’ at us, opening us up to the experience of being haunted. This is not, however, a haunting involving a supernatural presence, but rather one that forces our awareness of the unacknowledged continuities that still govern the power relations between the Polish Catholic residents and their Jewish or symbolically Jewish ‘others’. Our interpellation in Aftermath’s cinematic séance can be demonstrated with reference to a sequence that depicts a fire in the Kalinas’ field. Just before going to bed, Franek notices that the cleaned white shirt he has hung up to dry in his room is flickering with an orange glow. This is a proto-cinematic projection of a near-by fire, already drawing our attention

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Figs. 4.6 and 4.7  The gravestones and the burning barn in Aftermath addressing us

to how images are framed into visibility. The brothers rush to put out the fire, while the firemen refuse to help them. The film cuts to a mid-shot of the gravestones amidst the flames (Fig.  4.6). The dark night lends an abstract black background and the soundtrack a dramatic atmosphere as the camera moves to pick out the details of the gravestones engulfed in flames. Another cut shows the middle section of another burning grave marker, then a group of gravestones surrounded by fire, before the camera tracks slowly closer to them. The shots of the stones are not anchored to a diegetic perspective; the following shot is of the brothers in a police car at dawn. Instead, the matzevot seem to be specifically addressing the viewer, ‘looking back’ at us. Inserted into the sequence in which the brothers are taken to the police station is another striking image: an

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isolated barn on fire (Fig. 4.7). The image of the barn is also disconnected from diegetic perspectives, for while the brothers are within a moving vehicle, the shot itself is static, and held for several seconds. Both the gravestones and the barn thus seem to erupt from their diegetic context, as though challenging us to respond. One possible response to their address is to become actively involved in the process of interpretation and consider both moments figuratively. In other words, faced with such images that appear to ‘look back’ at us, we might treat them as epistemological puzzles to be solved, in a way that recalls a similar drive to pin down Holbein’s anamorphic image to a determined meaning. At the same time, viewers may find that the resonances conjured up by the images of the gravestones and the burning barn multiply and proliferate, such that, to borrow from the language of deconstruction (which, as noted in Chap. 2, is inherently spectral), ‘meaning is endlessly “deferred” in an infinitely long chain of referrals’ (Burchill 2009, 167). The images of the burning gravestones, then, might reference Polish crimes against their Jewish neighbours: we can connect the ‘burning’ of the gravestones with the burning of the Jewish residents in the Kalina homestead by Poles. Arguably, we are invited to see not just a rural fire but an entire context of destruction, as the images of the burning matzevot refer onwards to the destruction of Jewish people during the Holocaust more generally, and the devastation of Jewish memory and associated material objects such as gravestones. Indeed, the fate of matzevot is often associated with the fate of the Jewish people themselves. Young, for example, describes how Germans would turn their machine guns onto the gravestones, ‘recalling the treatment of Jews’; and further that ‘in wiping out a people, the Nazis not only destroyed those who would have preserved the memory of past generations; they also took pains to obliterate the spaces where the murdered might be remembered’ (Young 1994, 189). In Aftermath, however, it is Polish responsibility for murder that is indexed by the fire, which was set, after all, by Poles. The image of the burning barn is also multiply meaningful. On one level, it is a reminder of the crime that took place in this diegetic town in the past. At the same time, the image has a wider significance; it has become iconic of the horrific events at Jedwabne, as noted in Chap. 1. In much of the promotional material for the film, for example the Polish DVD cover and posters, it is the image of the burning barn that is reproduced alongside images of the starring actors, while a gravestone is only just visible in front of it. This is despite the fact that the burning barn is

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not significant to the narrative of the film at all, and is only seen in this brief shot during the fire sequence. The burning of Aftermath’s Jewish citizens did not occur in a barn but in the Kalina farmhouse. The image of the barn on fire might stimulate a chain of associated images and ideas: the Kalinas’ fictional burning house, the historical burning barn at Jedwabne, the images of the same powerfully associated with promotional material for books about Jedwabne (endlessly reproduced in Polish media), Betlejewski’s images of his performance involving the burning of a barn (also widely circulated in Polish media), and so on.22 The film opens itself up in this way to a kind of associative chain of violent images and moments, a process through which they are continuously re-inscribed in new contexts. Like spectres that have not been properly acknowledged, these images from Aftermath can be seen as ‘figure[s] of unruliness’ (Blanco and Peeren 2013, 9) shifting our attention from the context of the film to the historical contexts of Polish violence and the contemporary contexts of othering and exclusion. I want to return finally to Sobchack’s argument that Kieślowski’s cinematic things have both a ‘signifying power’, which we may attempt to unravel, and a ‘mysterious autonomy’ that exceeds our epistemological desires and capacities (2004, 91–92). Her suggestion that this power and autonomy is evoked through the cinematic rendering of the ‘material presentness’ of the object or image seems particularly apt for Aftermath’s movements towards, and cuts to, the details of the matzevot. This productive focus on detail can also be seen in Derrida’s comments on film analysis and psychoanalysis, which he comes to via a reference to the early film theory of Walter Benjamin. The ‘seeing and perception of detail in a film are in direct relation with psychoanalytic procedure’, he states, ‘enlargement does not only enlarge; the detail gives access to another scene, a heterogeneous scene’ (de Baecque and Jousse 2015, 26). The blowing up of the detail ‘changes the perception of the thing itself. One accedes to another space, to a heterogeneous time’ (de Baecque and Jousse 2015, 38). In this vision of spatio-temporal dislocation, something ‘other’ is introduced into the viewing experience, which might draw us away from considering the film as a generic thriller and towards recognising its engagement with historical desecration and suffering. For Sobchack, anamorphosis and the look-back of the object is not just about what she calls Lacan’s ‘limited—and negative—sense of subjective displacement and annihilation’ (2004, 97). The feeling of being addressed by an object or image may also be expansive, prompting us to think in renewed ethical

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and political ways about what is currently outside of our vision (Sobchack 2004, 97–98). In Derridean hauntology, too, ‘the ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought’, engaging us at the ‘border between the thought and the unthought’ (Davis 2007, 13). Such a process has an ethical resonance, entailing an openness towards, and a responsibility for, the other. This process in Aftermath, then, also has the capacity to invoke a self-reflexive and self-aware form of spectatorship, as viewers are addressed from within the film and asked to acknowledge continued structures of prejudice that might shape their worldview. The stones, in other words, shout at us.

The End(s) of Haunting? The investigative work performed by Franek in locating the burial site of the Jewish residents has some overlaps with the work of mourning, which Derrida suggests attempts to ‘ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localising the dead’ (1994, 9). In this conception of mourning, ‘nothing could be worse […] than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where—and it is necessary (to know—to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there’, and does not wander as a spectre (1994, 9). The final scene of the film, which takes place at Józef’s lapidarium, suggests that some of the work of mourning is unfolding. We are led to believe that the excavated bones of the massacre victims have been re-interred at this site. It is no longer accessed through the shadowy forest; instead, a wide, straight road leads to the field. The straight paths previously dominated by those who would repress the truth have been re-appropriated to serve the work of commemoration. A tour bus stands on this road; several different national flags are visible on its flank. It has clearly brought the people that we see gathered around the gravestones. The site has been cleaned up and a new memorial erected, in front of which a rabbi is saying Kaddish. Small stones lie on the matzevot, placed by Jewish mourners, and to these Franek adds a lit candle. This is the film’s final image: the pebbles and Franek’s candle on top of the gravestone, in a vision of combined Catholic and Jewish ritual. The ‘[grave]stones that shout’ have been to some extent domesticated: the camera no longer frames a ‘look back’ from the matzeva towards the viewers, but passes over it to isolate the symbolic tokens (or token symbols?) of commemoration.

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At first glance, then, the film’s ending appears to offer a kind of closure. If the proper mourning rituals are finally being conducted, then perhaps the haunting can be terminated. As Davis has written, once the ‘disturbance’ caused by haunting has been rectified, ‘once our symbolic debt has been duly paid, the domains of the living and the dead can be kept decently separate again’ (2007, 2). This seemed to be the hope of some of the film’s Polish critics, who considered that it could lead to a ‘true mourning’ for the Jewish victims of Polish crimes (Graff 2012), or contribute to a ‘cleansing’ of Polish conscience and perform an ‘exorcism’ of its ghosts (Sobolewski 2012). Indeed, the film bore the working title Kaddish, suggesting that it might perform a ritual mourning through the very process of its unfolding. As noted in Chap. 1, the discourse around catharsis and exorcism can be highly problematic, as Jewish suffering threatens to become a mere instrument ‘in the Polish narrative about themselves’ (Janicka and Żukowski 2016, 21), strategically deployed to ease the guilty consciences of audiences. However, not everything is as it seems in this scene of mourning. A close reading reveals several details that jar with the apparently seamless presentation of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation, as materially embodied in stone and candle. Not a single town resident is amongst the mourners, who are coded as ‘foreign’ by their tour bus and by the identical blue scarves tied around their necks, as often worn by Israeli tour groups in Poland. There is no communion between Polish and Jewish people, no human equivalent to the stone and the candle. Not even Franek, who seems to be on his way back to America and can hardly be said to be representative of the town’s inhabitants, joins the group. Unrecognised by the Polish residents at the beginning, the Jewish bodies remain unmourned by them at the end. Nor has there been a wider recognition of responsibility for the crime: looking closely at the new monument set amongst the gravestones points to another lacuna. Its inscription reads: ‘in memory of those who have been interred in this place’. There is no mention of the massacre or who was responsible for it. In its vagueness, the wording on Aftermath’s monument echoes that actually erected in Jedwabne in 2001, which is dedicated ‘to the Memory of Jews from Jedwabne and the Surrounding Area, Men, Women, and Children, Co-inhabitants of this Land, Who Were Murdered and Burned Alive on This Spot on July 10, 1941’. This monument replaced a previous one that had named ‘The Gestapo and Nazi Gendarmerie’ as responsible for the crime, without,

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however, going so far as to indict Polish inhabitants for their role in the atrocity. What we are left with, then, is not an exorcism of ghosts through ritual mourning, but a vision of unacknowledged continuity, whereby the town’s residents, through their absence in the commemoration and mourning ceremony, indicate an unwillingness to engage with the suffering and deaths of their Jewish neighbours. Derrida’s vision of haunting does not involve exorcism or epistemological ‘closure’, but it does involve a disruption to our everyday habits of thought and knowledge. The Derridean encounter with the spectral, like the viewer’s with Holbein’s stain or Lacan’s confrontation with the sardine tin, ‘rupture[s] the surface cohesion of the quotidian world’ (Sobchack 2004, 87) in a continual process. When Derrida calls on us to attend to the spectres of deceased others, this is not necessarily so that they can deliver a specific message, but rather that this attendance ‘may open us up to the experience of […] an essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know’ (Davis 2007, 11). Not knowing engages us continually in processes of renewed thought and effort. Our ethical obligation to the deceased entails a refusal to ‘terminate the process of grieving’ (Davis 2007, 148). Here, the process of grieving on the part of the Polish residents has not even begun, but, more problematically, neither has a wider acknowledgement of the crime and of the residents’ responsibility for it. What is needed, perhaps first and foremost, is, as Dziuban has argued, an ongoing ‘deconstructive practice’ aimed at unveiling and destabilising the very conditions of marginalisation and repression that produce spectres in the first place (2014b, 119–120). Cahill and Holland, commenting on Derrida’s conjunction of psychoanalysis, cinema, and spectrality, write that ‘cinema has the ability to bring together heterogeneous elements into a nondialectical copresence and unresolved tension […] cinema is thinking together’ (2015, 8). This chapter has brought into ‘copresence’ two conceptual frameworks, of spectrality and anamorphosis, in order to consider Aftermath as a kind of ‘séance’ that encourages us to see the persistence of structures of violence, greed, and exclusion. The film constructs a network of images and objects that seem to look back at its diegetic characters and its viewers. While not ‘ghosts’ themselves, these images nevertheless have the potential to haunt. Aftermath is a multiply haunted work with a number of competing tensions. It manifests a desire to produce evidence of a disputed atrocity, and to make archives and archaeology contribute to truth claims. At the same

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time, the film seems constantly to be trying out different ways to render this atrocity meaningful, to narrate and visibilise it. With each intertextual reference, generic borrowing or disjointed icon, the film’s images become more and more unruly. The effect is to constantly force viewers to question what we think we know and how we understand the images in front of us, a process that is epitomised in those moments where the images themselves seem to be addressing us, like spectres or points of anamorphosis.

Notes 1. Davis has argued that Derrida’s spectre ‘edges onto becoming the Lacanian Big Other, the despot whose laws we obey only because we cannot rid ourselves of our dependence on it’ (2007, 91). However, Davis also refers us to Žižek’s Lacanian critique of the Derridean spectre. For Žižek, spectrality ‘fills out the unrepresentable abyss of […] the non-symbolized real’, rather than being the apparition of an Other to whom we are indebted (1994, 26–27). 2. My italics. 3. Maciej Stuhr’s image appeared on the cover of political magazine Wprost in November 2012 with a graffitied Star of David and the word ‘Żyd’ (‘Jew’) superimposed over his face. The headline read ‘Maciej Stuhr lynched at his own request’, a reference to his defence of Aftermath. Janicka has argued that this headline reveals an assumption that by attacking Polish anti-­ Semitism one is asking to be lynched (2018, 49). 4. In Pigs/Psy (Poland, 1992) and its sequel Pigs 2: The Last Blood/Psy 2: Ostatnia Krew (Poland, 1994), Pasikowski made two of the most well-­ known films on Poland’s security services, which drew heavily on Hollywood action and gangster films. 5. I have considered elsewhere how Aftermath compares with films dealing with repressed histories through the Gothic genre (Mroz 2016). See Janicka (2018, 93) for further discussion of Aftermath’s deployment of the Western. She notes that, in Polish culture, the Western tends to be associated with the cult of the noble Catholic knight. Aftermath inverts this, she argues, by presenting a vision of a society constructed on anti-Semitism, robbery and murder, which cannot quite be restored to justice by the end. 6. For Żukowski, Aftermath’s generic borrowings are reminiscent of a hijack: the film draws viewers into a mysterious and exciting investigation, only to deny them the expected catharsis by locating ‘evil’ not in something that can be cast out and purged, but right at the heart of Polish society (2017, 336–338).

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7. It is worth noting that folklore is often closely tied to religion; both function as ‘the basis for one’s understanding of the world, social rules, and most of all identity’ (Janicka and Żukowski 2016, 47). For Propp, folklore is ‘part of the system of religious-ceremonial practice’ (1984, 11). Lehrer and Sendyka argue that a recurring tendency of Holocaust-themed Polish folk art involves using Catholic imagery in a way that effaces Jewish suffering and appropriates it for ‘the needs of Polish Catholic martyrdom’ (2019, 9). Aftermath seems to both draw on and expose this kind of mechanism. 8. Józef’s crucifixion generated controversy. Henryk Grynberg (n.d.), for example, considered it unbelievable and an unnecessary ‘emotional reinforcement’. Pasikowski has defended the image by likening Aftermath to a ‘passion play’, which needs a crucifixion (Quart 2013, 25). He was also inspired by an actual incident where ‘a few decades ago, a boy was crucified for some mundane reasons’ and decided to embed this event into the narrative of anti-Jewish violence (Quart 2013, 25). 9. Violence, Nancy argues, maintains an ‘essential link’ with images. ‘The torturers’ violence is the exhibition—at least for his own eyes—of the wounds of the victim’ (2005, 21). For Nancy, the crucifixion, in imaging ‘the god who shed his blood to save mankind’, epitomises the cruelty and violence that inheres in images (2005, 25). 10. See Janicka (2018, 4) who traces Aftermath’s citations of Shoah (Lanzmann 1985) and Arnold’s 2001 film Neighbours. 11. There are, of course, many differences between the two films, not least that Birthplace is a documentary about a returning Holocaust survivor, and Aftermath a fiction film about a returning perpetrator’s son. 12. Both Rancière and Margulies are here commenting on perpetrator re-­ enactments in Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (Cambodia/France, 2003). 13. The phrase appears, for example, in the booklet accompanying the 2012 DVD release. In commenting on Baksik’s photographs of Jewish gravestones, Gross also imbues them with agency. He writes: ‘perhaps these matzevot scattered about Poland have wandered in search of their dead?’ (Gross 2012, 35). 14. In Archive Fever, Derrida also compares ‘archaeological excavation’ with ‘the detection of the archive’, noting that they are both similar and incompatible (1995, 39, 58). Haunting, too, is bound up with the archive: ‘the structure of the archive is spectral’, he argues, as it conjures ‘a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met, no more than those of Hamlet’s father’ (1995, 54). 15. The title of this section borrows from Colin Davis’s 2007 book Haunted Subjects.

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16. See also Cholodenko (2004) who draws on Abraham and Torok in discussing cinema itself as a crypt. 17. Franek might not quite be the ‘scholar’ of Hamlet who is enjoined to speak with the ghost, but his position distantly echoes those of actual scholars breaking the taboos about Polish perpetration in their research. As noted in Chap. 2, these scholars have frequently been characterised as unwanted outsiders who defame Poland’s good name, a criticism levelled particularly against Gross; they have often been subjected to anti-Semitic abuse. 18. Davis takes as a ‘sign of resistance or denial’ the fact that Derrida, while writing prefaces for the psychoanalysts’ work and introducing it to a wider audience, never explicitly commented on the differences between their construction of spectrality and his own (2007, 83). 19. There are echoes here of Wojciech Wilczyk’s photography and video work, which records anti-Semitic graffiti in everyday Polish landscapes and the ways in which it is studiously ignored by passers-by (see for example his 2014 film We Are All Soccer Yobs). For Janicka and Żukowski, Wilczyk’s work suggests that anti-Semitic writing forms ‘part of the Polish landscape as something natural and obvious by itself. It does not disturb because nobody perceives it as a problem’ (2016, 129). Zawadzka refers to anti-­ Semitic graffiti as a ‘scenography’, a mise-en-scene, of everyday life; it creates a society of bystanders and a culture of acceptance of anti-Semitism (Zawadzka cited in Janicka 2014/2015, 180). 20. Since the Kalina brothers have been targeted by anti-Semitic graffiti, it is possible that Franek sees the hanged Star of David as specifically referring to him, although it has pre-existed his arrival in the town. 21. Holland also, however, warns us against ‘lumping cinema, psychoanalysis and deconstruction together’; Derrida denied that ‘his work was a variety of psychoanalysis’ (2015, 53). 22. See Chap. 1 for commentary on Betlejewski’s performance and short film Burning Barn (2010).

References Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel, Volume 1. Trans. N. Rand. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Aftermath DVD booklet. 2012. Warsaw: G+J Gruner + Jahr Polska Sp. Z.o.o. & Co. Arnold, Agnieszka. 2001. Neighbours. Poland. Backman Rogers, Anna. 2019. Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure. New York: Berghahn Books. Baksik, Łukasz. 2012. Matzevot for Everyday Use. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne. Betlejewski, Rafał. 2010. Burning Barn/Płonie Stodoła. Poland.

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Blanco, María del Pilar, and Esther Peeren. 2013. Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 1–27. London: Bloomsbury. Buczkowski, Leonard. 1947. Zakazane Piosenki/Forbidden Songs. Poland. Burchill, Louise. 2009. Derrida and the (Spectral) Scene of Cinema. In Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed. Felicity Colman, 164–178. London: Acumen Press. Cahill, James Leo, and Timothy Holland. 2015. Double Exposures: Derrida and Cinema, an Introductory Séance. Discourse 37 (1–2): 3–21. Castricano, Jodey. 2001. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Cholodenko, Alan. 2004. The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema. Cultural Studies Review 10 (2): 99–113. Cohn, Robert L. 2015. Stony Survivors: Images of Jewish Space on the Polish Landscape. In Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland, ed. Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng, 208–222. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Davis, Colin. 2007. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. De Baecque, Antoine, and Thierry Jousse. 2015. Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Discourse 37 (1–2): 22–39. Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. In The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, xi–xlviii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Diacritics 25 (2): 9–63. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2008. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Dolar, Mladen. 2015. Anamorphosis. S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8: 125–140. Dziuban, Zuzanna. 2014b. Memory as Haunting. HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities 12: 111–135. ———. 2019a. Introduction: Haunting in the Land of the Untraumatised. In The Spectral Turn: Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire, ed. Zuzanna Dziuban, 7–47. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. ———. 2019b. Of Ghosts’ (In)ability to Haunt: Polish Dybbuks. In The Spectral Turn: Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire, ed. Zuzanna Dziuban, 131–183. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Etkind, Alexander. 2013. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Stanford: Stanford California Press. Forecki, Piotr. 2013b. Pokłosie, poGrossie i kibice polskości. Studia Litteraria et Historica 2: 211–235.

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Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Graff, Agnieszka. 2012. “Pokłosie”—wina, gniew, z˙ałoba. Gazeta Wyborcza, 1 December. Gross, Jan T. 2003. Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941. London: Arrow Books. ———. 2012. The Matzevot Return to the Cemetery. In Matzevot for Everyday Use, Łukasz Baksik, 35–36. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne. Grynberg, Henryk. n.d. The Aftermath, Ida, etcetera. The American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies. Accessed 26 April 2020. http://www.aapjstudies.org/ index.php?id=209. Guruianu, Andrei, and Natalia Andrievskikh. 2019. The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste. Anderson: Parlor Press. Hitchcock, Alfred. 1940. Foreign Correspondent. USA. Holland, Timothy. 2015. Ses Fantômes: the Traces of Derrida’s Cinema. Discourse 37 (1–2): 40–62. Janicka, Elz˙bieta. 2014/2015. Pamięć przyswojona. Koncepcja polskiego doświadczenia zagłady Żydów jako traumy zbiorowej w świetle rewizji kategorii świadka. Studia Litteraria et Historica 3 (4): 148–227. ———. 2018. Corpus Christi, corpus delicti—nowy kontrakt narracyjny. Pokłosie (2012) Władysława Pasikowskiego wobec kompromitacji kategorii polskiego świadka Zagłady. Studia Litteraria et Historica 7: 1–93. Janicka, Elz˙bieta, and Tomasz Żukowski. 2016. Philo-Semitic Violence? New Polish Narrative About Jews After 2000. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN Wydawnictwo. Kamieńska, Anna. 1983. Introduction. In Time of Stones, Monika Krajewska. Warsaw: Interpress. Kear, Adrian. 1999. Diana Between Two Deaths: Spectral Ethics and the Time of Mourning. In Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief, ed. Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, 169–186. New York: Routledge. Krajewska, Monika. 1983. Time of Stones. Warsaw: Interpress. Lacan, Jacques. 1986. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin. Langford, Barry. 2005. Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lanzmann, Claude. 1985. Shoah. France/UK. Łoziński, Paweł. 1992. Birthplace/Miejsce Urodzenia. Poland. Margulies, Ivone. 2019. In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press. Marzynski, Marian. 1996. Shtetl. USA. Mroz, Matilda. 2016. Spectral Cinema: Anamorphosis and the Haunted Landscapes of Aftermath and The Devil’s Backbone. In Haunted Landscapes, ed.

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Niamh Downing and Ruth Heholt, 41–57. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2005. The Ground of the Image. New  York: Fordham University Press. Nowicka, Magdalena. 2015. Polskość jako przedmiot sporu. Przykład kontrowersji wokół filmu Pokłosie w rez˙. Władysława Pasikowskiego [Polishness as an Object of Dispute: The Case of Controversy Over Władysław Pasikowski’s Film Aftermath]. Studia Socjologiczne 1: 183–210. Panh, Rithy. 2003. S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Cambodia/France. Pasikowski, Władysław. 1992. Psy/Pigs. Poland. ———. 1994. Psy 2: Ostatnia Krew/Pigs 2: The Last Blood. Poland. ———. 2012. Pokłosie/Aftermath. Poland/Russia/Netherlands. Pawlikowski, Paweł. 2013. Ida. Poland/Denmark/France/UK. Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Second Edition. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1984. Theory and History of Folklore. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Quart, Leonard. 2013. Breaking National Taboos: An Interview with Władysław Pasikowski and Dariusz Jabłoński. Cineaste 39 (1): 22–25. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. London and New York: Verso. Rand, Nicholas T. 1994. Introduction: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. In The Shell and the Kernel, Volume 1, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, 1–22. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sadowska, Małgorzata. 2012a. Thriller z Jedwabnem w tle. Władysław Pasikowski opowiada swoim filmie “Pokłosie”. Newsweek, 20 October. Accessed 6 October 2020. https://www.newsweek.pl/poklosie-filma-pasikowskiego-wladyslawao-jedwabnem/zfkncdw. ———. 2012b. Z bliska widok jest brzydki. Polskie filmy o Żydach. Newsweek, 28 May. Accessed 29 April 2020. https://www.newsweek.pl/filmy-­o-­zydach-zbliska-widok-jest-brzydki/tvyq8fm. Saghafi, Kas. 2010. Apparitions—Of Derrida’s Other. New  York: Fordham University Press. Sendyka, Roma. 2013. Pryzma—zrozumieć nie-miejsce pamięci (non-lieu de mémoire). Teksty Drugie 1 (2): 323–344. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York and London: Routledge. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sobolewski, Tadeusz. 2012. Pokłosie. Gazeta Wyborcza, 8 November. Accessed 20 April 2020. https://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,12813845,__Poklosie____ Recenzja_Tadeusza_Sobolewskiego.html.

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Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. 2019. Pogrom Cries—Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946. 2nd rev. ed. Berlin: Peter Lang. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury. Waligórska, Magdalena. 2013. The Jewish-Theme Whodunnit in Contemporary Poland and Germany. East European Jewish Affairs 43 (2): 143–161. Warner, Marina. 1995. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. London: Vintage. Whittaker, Tom. 2014. Ghostly Resonance: Sound, Memory and Matter in Las Olas and Dies d’agost. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 15 (3): 323–336. Wilczyk, Wojciech. 2014. We Are All Soccer Yobs. Poland. Young, James E. 1994. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ———. 1994. Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology. In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, 1–33. London and New York: Verso. Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2006. The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. Narrative Shock and Polish Memory Remaking in the Twenty-First Century. In Memory and Postwar Memorials: Confronting the Violence of the Past, ed. Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan, 95–115. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Żukowski, Tomasz. 2017. Spór o reguły komunikacji. Dyskusja wokół Jedwabnego. In Debaty po Roku 1989: Literatura w Procesach Komunikacji, w Stronę Nowej Syntezy (2), ed. Maryla Hopfinger, Zygmunt Zia ̨tek, and Tomasz Żukowski, 263–344. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN. Wydawnictwo. ———. 2018a. Wielki Retusz: Jak Zapomnieliśmy, z˙e Polacy Zabijali Żydów. Warsaw: Wielka Litera.

CHAPTER 5

The Fabric with Its Rend: Framing Grief, Materialising Loss and Ida’s Temporalities

Towards the end of Pawlikowski’s Ida, the titular character arrives in the empty apartment of her aunt Wanda, who has committed suicide. As Ida clears away the detritus of Wanda’s life, the camera briefly focuses on a section of the kitchen table on which sugar has been spilled (Fig. 5.1). The sugar had been sprinkled carelessly over a piece of bread; we have watched Wanda prepare a meal just like this not long before. With the bread removed, the white granules of sugar frame a void. The image becomes an indexical trace of Wanda’s presence, like a footprint or a photograph. It also encapsulates the film’s invocation of certain questions: how can something that is no longer present be framed? How can grief be given a visible form? How does loss shape our understanding of the matter left behind in its wake? The void on the kitchen table is one of a series of similarly-­ framed images in Ida where loss seems to lie at the heart of the visible. This network of images forms part of an aesthetic of grief that is materialised in film form, and traced particularly across the simultaneously material and immaterial qualities of light ‘captured’ in photographs and framed through windows. In thinking about how loss shapes cinematic images, this chapter draws on Brinkema’s writing on grief as inhering in material filmic objects and taking shape in cinematic structures.1 For Brinkema, grief is a painful suffering that is non-recuperable in meaning; this, then, is another way of formulating the point at which our ability to make meaning falters, something that I have been tracing throughout this book. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Mroz, Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7_5

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Fig. 5.1  Spilled sugar frames a void in Ida

Loss permeates Ida’s narrative. Ida’s parents were murdered during the Holocaust by a member of the Catholic family (Szymon Skiba and his son Feliks) that was hiding them. Wanda lost her child in the same way. These individual losses are set against a backdrop of the vaster loss of Jewish communities in the Holocaust, which is occasionally gestured towards in the film. Ida suggests the impossibility of properly recognising these losses in 1960s Poland, an era of silencing and erasure. Ida’s and Wanda’s return to the village of Ida’s birth in order to find material traces of the past echoes the investigative framework of Birthplace (Łoziński 1992)  and Aftermath (Pasikowski 2012). Like them, Ida forges connections between the literal excavation of bones from the earth, and the emergence of previously withheld historical narratives. It, too, suggests that processes of excavation, both literal and metaphorical, are fraught and tentative, suggestive of what still remains lost to vision, knowledge and understanding. The two earlier films, however, mobilise a powerful critique of continuing structures of violence in the present day. Ida, on the other hand, is

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steeped in a pervasive ‘pastness’, which largely brackets off the questions of Polish responsibility for violence against Jewish people as something that belongs to history. Absence and loss in Ida might then also refer to a particular de-framing of, or detachment from, critical approaches to history and historiography. The film has been criticised both for its deployment of stereotype and for obscuring Polish guilt with layers of aesthetic ambiguity (Chmielewska 2017, 323). Also subject to criticism has been the outpouring of commentary on the film that itself valorises Ida’s ambiguity and disengages from its problematic politics.2 This chapter may well be seen as another example of such a work, yet I proceed on the basis that Ida’s politics have been extensively charted, while its aesthetics have been less frequently subjected to a close reading.3 In this chapter, I am interested in precisely how the film, thematically and aesthetically, shapes itself around loss. I set these questions against a wider reflection on Didi-­ Huberman’s approach to art images (see Chap. 2). For Didi-Huberman, the way in which the image both materialises for us and withholds from us must be thought together, as part of an ‘anadyomene movement’ (2005, 143). The paradox or dialectic of the image places us between seeing and knowing, where we must think ‘the fabric (the fabric of representation) with its rend’ and ‘the function (the symbolic function) with its interruption’ (Didi-Huberman 2005, 144). He counsels us to be open to ‘not-­ knowledge’, to what ‘elicit[s] naming’ and ‘leave[s] us gaping’ (Didi-Huberman 2005, 1). Ida, I argue, continually braids knowledge and not-knowledge together. Didi-Huberman’s notion of thinking with is useful as a framework for considering the paradoxes of Ida’s images, which ask us to think presence with absence, materiality with loss, light with shadow, framed visibility with off-screen space, and, indeed, ambiguity with stereotype. In particular, taking inspiration from Didi-Huberman’s suggestively tactile word ‘fabric’, I seek to identify a dynamic conjunction of textured, material surfaces with terraced depths created through the use of deep focus shots and staging-in-depth. Such framings perform an ‘anadyomene movement’ in which the image is offered up as near-tactile, material presence, while something is continually falling away into the impenetrable depths of the frame, enacting the dialectic of presence and absence through film form and mise-en-scene. I extrapolate from Didi-Huberman’s approach to the paradoxes of the image to consider the ways in which Ida frames multiple identities together, for example Jewishness with Catholicism and, problematically, with Communism, the presence of God with his absence, and

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the ‘rescuer’ with the ‘perpetrator’. The film moves us towards the historical (the Holocaust, Stalinism), and away again into the realm of private loss, grief and faith. The chapter points to the importance of temporality in Didi-Huberman’s process of confronting images, thinking this together ‘with’ a temporal philosophy drawn from Bergson, in order to set some of these conflicts into motion through time.

Erasures Ida takes place after the events of the ‘Polish October’ of 1956, a period of de-Stalinisation, growing consumerism, and Western influence, which the film references through its diegetic use of American jazz and Italian pop songs.4 For Pawlikowski, this was a period in which Poland was ‘very much alive’ (Levine 2015); the younger generations in particular were largely shifting away from the guilt and trauma of WWII (Mazierska 2010, 46). Commenting specifically on the society we see in Ida, Leder (2015) describes its representation of a generation who have no desire to remember, grieve or mourn, whose only plans are to play and dance, and then settle and reproduce. These post-war years saw the shaping of a particular mythology of WWII, one which revolved around the suffering of the Polish nation. There was little room for Jewish victimhood within this frame except in the ways dictated by the state. A distorted national narrative relating to WWII thus emerged, characterised, as Glowacka and Zylinska write, by a ‘“pathological amnesia” about Jewish life and death’ (2007, 5). The creation of this narrative involved, as Żukowski has argued, a whitewashing of texts that spoke of Polish violence against Jewish people, and thus an exclusion of unwanted elements from history (2018b, 389). The era also saw a resurgence of anti-Semitism in public discourse, and Steinlauf estimates that more than half of Poland’s remaining Jewish residents left the country between 1956 and 1960 (1997, 67). Ida, then, is set not only in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jewish community during the Holocaust, but also during the subsequent expulsions of some of what remained of Jewish culture, history and people.5 In Ida, the lack of place for Jewish memory and the non-recognition of Jewish loss and suffering might be extrapolated from what the film suggests about the two institutions that feature in the film: the Church and the judicial system. At first glance, these institutions might seem opposed to one another, yet they are paralleled in a number of ways. For Leder (2015), for example, Ida and Wanda, as Holocaust survivors dwelling in a

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void left behind by the loss of their families, have both invested in their respective institutions as their only way of connecting with a community. In both their choices, however, they come up continually against death. Wanda sentenced people to death, while Leder sees the convent as itself a kind of void where one is neither in life nor death. More broadly, both institutions are bound up with erasure and silencing. The convent has attempted to erase Ida, the Jewish child, and replace her with Anna, the christened Catholic orphan and, later, novice. The Mother Superior may have initiated Ida’s (initially unwitting) search for the truth of her Jewish identity, but this truth is precisely not something that can be spoken within the walls of the institution. When Ida later questions the parish priest from her village, he denies having any memory of her family, and expresses disdainful surprise that she could possibly be connected with them. If the film suggests that there is no recognition of Jewish suffering possible through the Church, neither, it seems, is there a place for it within the judicial system. What the film does suggest about the judiciary is instructive: a panel of three judges hears an absurd charge relating to the ‘anti-Socialist’ act of slicing up a ceremonial bed of tulips. However, it is never considered that the murder of three Jewish Poles could be pursued through the courts. When Wanda attempts to interrogate Szymon and Feliks Skiba, it is clear that she is drawing on her association with the law and state-sanctioned violence (‘I could ruin you’, she says to Feliks). In a horrific echo of the courtroom defendant’s beheading of the tulips, Wanda asks whether Szymon killed her family ‘with an axe’. Yet it is the contrasts between Wanda’s interrogations and the courtroom scene that leap out. Her (largely failed) interrogations take place within a hospital and a domestic space, and there is no hint of bringing anyone before a court. The deal struck between Ida and Feliks is that the latter will reveal the burial place of the family if Ida and Wanda will renounce their claim to the house. This is not a claim that Ida and Wanda have articulated; rather, it is suggestive of the pervasive fear amongst many non-Jewish Poles that returning Jewish citizens would reclaim ‘what is theirs’ (Forecki 2015, 86. See also Chap. 1). The crime of the murder of three Jewish citizens, the film suggests, falls outside of the purview and interest of the current judicial system. Interrogations are conducted in a private, not a legal, capacity. It is within this climate of erasure that Ida and Wanda encounter each other, both in different ways marked by the murder of their family and more generally of the war and Holocaust. Wanda, we learn, was a member of the Communist resistance during the war; she now decries her decision

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to leave her child in the hands of the Skibas to fight in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Many insurgents of the non- or anti-Communist persuasion, denounced as ‘enemies of the people’, are likely to have come before her court after the war, and been imprisoned and executed under her orders.6 The trajectory of Ida’s life has also been indelibly marked by the murder of her parents. The film to some extent bridges individual and collective histories. Amongst Wanda’s family photographs is an image of Irena Sendlerowa, the head of the children’s section of the Polish Council to Aid Jews (Żegota), which was active during WWII.7 Wanda’s response to Ida when she expresses her desire to visit the graves of her parents is also indicative of wider losses: ‘they have no graves’, she says, ‘neither them nor any other Jews.’

Unfoldings Ida’s symbolic characterisations have been a focus of much of the discussion around the film. Ida and Wanda have frequently been seen in terms of a dichotomous juxtaposition: Catholic and Jewish, spiritual and secular, Virgin and Whore (Rydzewska 2017). Wanda herself sardonically comments on Ida’s ‘saint’-like behaviour as opposed to her own. Such categorisations make it easier to read the characters as reflective of wider dualities within the film or within Polish society; Blacker, indeed, argues that ‘the primary function of Pawlikowski’s characters is symbolic’ (2016, 136). For Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Wanda ‘represents’ Holocaust experience, Polish resistance, and post-war Communist memory (2015, 153). He cites film critic David Denby, who goes further, ‘Wanda, we can’t help thinking, is Polish history, both grieved over and unredeemed’ (2015, 154). For other writers, it is Ida who comes to represent Poland: the ‘meek Catholic nun serves as a natural metaphor for Poland’ (Blacker 2016, 136). According to Szaniawski (2015), in her need to come to terms with the past and the future, ‘Anna’s/Ida’s fate is […] akin to Poland’s’. Here, I want to suggest another way of ‘reading’ Ida’s characters which opens out these categorisations to temporal flux. Readings that favour the symbolic and the emblematic can often reduce what changes through the duration of a film to a handful of concepts, abstracting characters, images and moments from their presentation through time.8 The art object, to use Didi-Huberman’s words, thus becomes ‘dispossessed of its own specific deployment and unfolding’ (2005, 3). Bergsonian duration offers a

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framework to think about identities in terms of gradually evolving changes rather than distinct states. Bergson distinguished between differences in kind—spatial differences such as distances between objects that are more or less measurable—and differences in degree, which refer to psychic states, sensations and affects that cannot be simply reduced to numerical terms (see Mroz 2012, 3). Psychical states are not like self-contained objects in space; they blend into one another in a process of transition. ‘If we artificially arrest this indiscernible transition’, writes Grosz, ‘we can understand states as separate entities, linked by succession, but we lose whatever it is that flows in change, we lose duration itself’ (2004, 158–159). It was through Deleuze and Guattari’s appraisal of Bergsonian temporality in A Thousand Plateaus (2017, first published in 1980), that the philosophers introduced the notion of ‘becoming’ which, as Sutton and Martin-Jones argue, became ‘the keystone of their philosophy of life itself’ (2013, 46). In this Bergsonian vision, identity is not a state of being but ‘is always coming-into-being, a never-ending project of becoming’ (2013, 46). Becomings are molecular, that is, made up of a variety of compositional elements and characteristics ‘that may at any time change and reform’ (48). The idea that identity is ‘always in motion’ (Sutton and Martin-Jones 2013, 45) can be seen through the processes of becoming of Ida herself. Ida begins the film as Anna, a Catholic novice, but both character and viewer soon become aware of the other traces, heritages and identities that run through her on a molecular level. Wanda’s announcement that Anna is a ‘Jewish nun’ is initially presented, through cinematic form, as a moment of epistemological shock. As Skaff notes, Ida receives the information with an unchanging expression, but at crucial moments in this exchange with her aunt, the conventional shot-reverse-shot editing pattern is foregone (2018, 18). Our focus thus remains on Ida’s face captured in mid-shot as Wanda tells her the news. For Skaff, ‘this is not a two-way conversation but a shot, like a bullet, into Ida’s being’ (2018, 18). The emergence of this knowledge dissolves our certainty in her seemingly fixed identity. As the film unfolds, her Jewish heritage continually places elements of her Catholic identity into doubt; they mingle and braid together. It is significant, furthermore, that at the point of Wanda’s revelation, she produces an image of Ida’s mother Róz˙a (Fig.  5.2). The photograph is posed by the same actress, so that Anna and Róz˙a appear identical. Not only is Anna realizing a becoming-Ida, but we can also see how she bears the face of another, which visualizes these multiplicities. The photograph,

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Fig. 5.2  Ida: Wanda’s photograph of Róz˙a and Ida

which also shows Ida as a baby in her mother’s arms, serves here to momentarily ‘spatialise’ the fluctuations of Ida’s identity.9 Aptly, the way in which the intellect tends to spatialise time, fixing temporal flow into successive moments, is described by Grosz as akin to the production of a series of ‘snapshots’, freeze-frames in which we can discern a ‘state’ that is extracted from the flow of becoming in an artificial arrest of duration (2004, 235).10 In the first half of the film, there are few indications that Ida is aware of her own corporeality, apart from a few moments of awkward physical contact. In the course of the film, however, she seems to gradually discover herself as a sensory being; particular moments visualize for us what is a mostly indiscernible unfolding. When she returns to the convent, for example, she pauses to smell the leaves that she is plaiting together into a wreath, and gazes at another novice’s body whose soaked clothing clings to her during a bath. Upon returning to Wanda’s flat after her aunt’s death, Ida savours the unfamiliar taste and sensation of vodka and cigarettes, and the new ways of feeling her own body: walking in high heels,

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dancing, touching another person. The film allows us to dwell upon the textures of her contact with unfamiliar fabrics: Wanda’s evening dress, the white net curtain that she cocoons herself in, the bed sheets amongst which she has made love. We see, here, the body and identity in the process of change and transformation (the net curtain, wrapped tightly around Ida’s form, is appropriately suggestive of a chrysalis). These scenes following Wanda’s death in particular suggest Ida’s becoming-Wanda, in a process of cross-fertilisation. While not denying the differences between Ida and Wanda, the ways in which they are so frequently opposed in scholarly and critical discussion of the film distracts us from fluctuations in identity. Anna’s becoming-Ida and Ida’s becoming-Wanda allows us to intuit identity through duration as gradually evolving interpenetrations. However, once we begin to think about identity as a process of becoming that upsets fixed categorisations, we come up against difficult questions of guilt and responsibility, which can lead to problematic conclusions. For example, Wanda’s character combines Jewishness and Communism in the objectionable stereotype of ‘z˙ydokomuna’, and she is both victim and perpetrator. As Rydzewska (2017) writes, ‘Wanda is responsible for the deaths of Polish patriots she has convicted in communist stage trials but the Polish peasants killed her own son.’ A victim of violence during the Holocaust, Wanda’s identity also encompasses acts of perpetration in a violent and repressive state system in post-war Poland. Wanda discusses her past as something that has finished, ‘gone with the wind’, yet still wryly refers to herself as ‘Bloody Wanda’ in the present tense: ‘that’s me’. Her present actions retain those of her past, which is hinted at through the threats she deploys during her interrogation of Feliks. The film also takes twists and turns through the construction of the seemingly opposed categories of Holocaust ‘rescuer’ and ‘perpetrator’. In her interview with Szymon, Wanda assumes that he is the perpetrator of the murders of her family, though he claims that he helped to keep them alive. Eventually, it is Feliks who confesses to being the perpetrator. Yet much is left unclear about the murders; it is implied that Feliks initially assisted in the rescue before becoming a perpetrator (while ‘saving’ Ida). Szymon, initially involved in the rescue, may have been complicit in the murders and in the appropriation of the property. There are resonances here with recent scholarship that has questioned the usefulness of strict categorisations demarcating positions taken during the Holocaust. For example, Engelking has argued that in the latter years of German occupation in the Polish countryside, Hilberg’s triad of perpetrators, victims and

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local witnesses or bystanders broke down (2011, 257). ‘Poles, who were counted amongst the victims of Nazism’, she writes, ‘now sometimes aided in perpetration’, by committing acts of violence and murder against Jewish people hiding in the countryside (257). Memoirs and testimonies suggest that some rescuers may have occasionally murdered those in their care (220). Further, Engelking writes, Poles ‘could also—like the Jews— become victims of their own neighbours, who denounced them to the Nazis’ (257). The temporal aspect that is implicit in Engelking’s writing is made explicit in Fulbrook’s critique of strict categorizations as failing to account for the ‘dimension of time’ (2019, 24). Rather than thinking in terms of categories into which individuals can be fixed, we should think in terms of ‘behaviours’ ‘in evolving situations’ where power structures and social relations were continually changing (24). For Dan Bar-On, victimisation, perpetration and bystanding are ‘process[es] in which one passes gradually through certain thresholds’ (2001, 127). Such language resonates with a Bergsonian vision of identities as defying fixed states, and with the focus instead on compositional elements ‘that may at any time change and reform’ (Sutton and Martin-­Jones 2013, 48). Through these oscillations and changes, the demarcating lines between rescuer and perpetrator are blurred and put into motion by the film.11 This is not to say that no blame can be ascribed, or that the boundary between rescuer and perpetrator is entirely erased. However, as a number of critics have noted, this leaves the film open to presenting some objectionable ideas, for example that Feliks is potentially redeemed by his ‘rescue’ of Ida (Chmielewska 2017, 323). For Chmielewska, the film’s blurring of biographies falls into the false but popular way of searching for a ‘golden mean’ in wartime and post-war history, in which some Polish responsibility for the deaths of Jewish people is conceded only if Jewish complicity in the deaths of gentile Poles is accepted (2017, 326).

Framing Texture, Disappearing Into Depth Another way in which a dynamic oscillation between states and identities is held open in Ida is through the framing of presence and absence. Ida’s characters are frequently pushed towards the edges of the screen. At times, vast sections of sky or landscape occupy the remainder of the frame. At other points, walls or other seemingly unremarkable elements of interior space fill in large portions of it. The framing repeatedly bisects characters to remove limbs and facial features from vision. Much of the ‘background’

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spaces seem empty, while the characters in the foreground are often sliding towards off-screen space. This formal intertwining of presence and absence resonates with the film’s conceptualisations of loss, as though the film were continually asking us to think about what is not present. It may be an apt rendering for the ways in which explorations of Jewish history continually come up against what has been erased and removed from the frame. At the same time, Pawlikowski has emphasised that he was careful to include evidence of activity in many of the shots (Levine 2015); attention to the background might reveal a dog scavenging, a bicyclist riding past, or, significantly, bystanders watching. We are thus faced with numerous contradictions in Ida’s framing. Spaces often seem ‘abandoned’ (Wheatley 2014), yet simultaneously, to cite Pawlikowski, ‘there is always some life’ (Levine 2015). This ‘life’ might, however, evoke the threat of surveillance. Where Didi-Huberman suggested that we must confront the single image dialectically by holding open its paradoxical elements, thinking the ‘fabric’ of representation with its ‘rend’ or interruption (2005, 144), so across the film Ida encourages us to think together potentially contrasting impulses: deadening with ‘life’, emptiness with observation. This way of confronting images is suggestive when it comes to considering the film’s presentation of religion, or more specifically, the question of the presence or absence of God.12 For Vredenburgh, for example, the film’s static framing and focus on Ida’s face evokes Paul Schrader’s concept of ‘transcendental style’, which expresses a spiritual presence (2016, 14). For Lauder, the long-shots in which characters ‘seem small against a vast background’ remind us ‘that we, finite as we are, are called toward the infinite’ (2014, 39). When Ida, placed at the edge of the frame in a long-­ shot, prays at the roadside, and the sky stretches out beyond her, we may well ‘read’ grace and transcendence into this image. On the other hand, the framing of the vast sky lends itself just as easily to a contrary interpretation, which might see a void rather than a spiritual opening, the absence of God rather than his presence. Indeed, this might be particularly relevant when considering the film’s unfolding in a ‘post-Holocaust world’, in which ‘the notion that God was dead was one that gained increasing popularity’ (Abrams 2014, 151).13 Early on in the film, when Ida expresses her desire to find her parents’ home, Wanda replies: ‘what if you go there and find there is no God?’ In response to a look from Ida, she continues, ‘I know, I know, God is everywhere’. The film holds open the possibility that, conversely, God might be nowhere. It encourages us to think God’s presence with his absence, faith with its ‘rend’.14

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An unexplored, but just as significant, element of Ida’s frames is their dynamic presentation of textured surfaces and depths. The deep-focus long-shots not only emphasise the frequent positioning of characters as small within the frame, but also tend to stage a three-dimensional space of terraced depths within the image. A prime example is the recurring image of the road ahead of the women as Wanda drives, often seen through the windshield of the car, which presents itself as a horizon extending to a vanishing point through the depths of the image. This kind of composition, where spaces open out through the z-axis towards other depths in the frame, continually recurs in the film; for example, Ida first enters Wanda’s building from the depths of a long exterior corridor, and a similar composition shows them entering Szymon’s building. When Wanda jumps from the window in her flat, this is framed in a similar way: the darkened room forms a corridor leading to the rectangle of light framed by the window, through which trees and a landscape can be glimpsed (Fig.  5.3). Wanda thus disappears from the film by falling away into its depths. An image of Wanda’s flat after her death is also striking: the shot shows the living room with a number of open doors leading into other rooms, through which we can see further doors and windows leading into yet other spaces. The deep focus shots make it possible to pick out the sharp details of the images’ textured materialities. The spaces around the characters may give the impression of being ‘empty’, yet they are often replete with patterns and textures, in the form of peeling paint, metal curlicues, dilapidated stone, and lace fabrics. In exterior shots, matter also frequently forms a textured surface: the spikiness of bare trees, the rippled snow outside the convent. Light, too, creates texture, particularly in the shots of Wanda and Ida in the car, where trees reflected in the window create shadows across their faces, which appear as patterned surfaces. In order to consider the significance of framed material textures in Ida, I want to turn again to Didi-Huberman’s encounter with Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation in a Florentine monastery (see Chap. 2). Didi-­ Huberman writes how viewers of the painting are inclined to pay attention to the ‘narrative sequence’ that ‘offer[s] itself for reading’ and ignore non-­ representational visual elements like the cell wall and the light from the window (2005, 13). If we remain ‘face to face’ with the image, however, we may find ourselves progressively unable or unwilling to make it legible or to ‘grasp’ it, and instead allow it to ‘grasp’ us (17). This does not mean that the fresco should be seen as devoid of meaning, but rather that it makes possible ‘entire constellations of meaning, of which we must accept

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Fig. 5.3  Light framed by shadows in Wanda’s living room in Ida

never to know the totality and the closure’ (18). Didi-Huberman encourages us to attend to the materiality of paint rather than immediately or only decoding what a painting supposedly represents. The texture of paint unsettles, ‘even tyrannizes’, symbolic frameworks (268). Didi-Huberman connects the ‘pan’ (material zones of paint) with Alois Riegl’s notion of the haptic as a ‘quasi-touching’ (2005, 270). Laura Marks’s concept of haptic visuality in cinema also draws on Riegl, providing a useful opportunity to draw Didi-Huberman’s writing into dialogue with cinema. Marks describes how cinema may privilege material presence through, for example, offering close-up images over which the camera ‘grazes’, evading ‘a distanced view, instead pulling the viewer in close’ (2000, 163). There are a few moments in Ida that particularly evoke the haptic. When Wanda washes her face in the sink following her failed questioning of Szymon, for example, the film frames the black strands of her wet hair shedding droplets in close-up. Her hair impedes our vision of her facial expression, which thus cannot be ‘read’; the image instead resonates

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with a material presence. However, cinema tends to invoke texture as a material presence only while creating a ‘poignant awareness of the missing sense of touch’ (Marks 2000, 129). As Laura McMahon has written, ‘the sense of touch awakened by cinema is one which takes place as withdrawal’ (2012, 1). Material presence in the image, then, may trail along with it a sense of loss that relates to both the frustrated sense of touch and to what Didi-Huberman identifies as our inability to ‘grasp’ the materiality of paint and light ‘in the snare of a definition’ (2005, 17). In Ida, textured surfaces tend to be presented in the same frame as the depths. Even in the ‘haptic’ shot of Wanda, there is a space between her hands and her face through which the depth of the room is suggested. Ida frames a dynamic and paradoxical relationship between depth and surface. On the one hand, textured surfaces seem to reinforce material presence in the frame, albeit without ever fulfilling the promise of touch. At the same time, the depths within the image become elements that are unavailable to further vision, something that is continually falling away into the distances of the pictured space. Loss is thus performed across the frames in their oscillation between material textures and depths. What might be said of the image of the face in this schema? The face in cinema, particularly when it is framed in close-up, has consistently been seen as a privileged site for the transmission of meaning and emotion. It would thus seem to align with Didi-Huberman’s ‘detail’, something that might be extracted from the frame, and come to constitute a key to the meaning of a particular scene or moment (2005, 231). Turning to Ida, however, we may find that this is not always the case. There are relatively few tight framings of the face in Ida; instead, faces are often decentered in the frame or set amidst mid- and long-shots. This is not to say that the images of the face do not stand out from the background; they often do, but not necessarily as sites of ‘graspable’ meaning. For example, there are many shots showing Ida looking: out the car window, at the jazz band, at her aunt, at the murderer of her parents. These shots are frequently held for a few seconds of screen time, long enough to give a sense that the face is offering itself up to us for a reading of her expression or a hint of her thoughts, while simultaneously withdrawing this promise through the ambiguity of her countenance. Once again, we seem to be in the realm of Didi-Huberman’s ‘anadyomene movement’, of meaning or expression emerging as a potential within the image before plunging us back into the ‘rend’ in representation (2005, 144). Ida’s face might be the site at which the ‘detail’, a ‘semiotic object tending towards stability and closure’ slides

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into becoming the pan, ‘semiotically labile and open’ (269), another textured surface that ‘surges forth’ without necessarily becoming available to a reading. In what follows, I will continue to relate Ida’s framing to the film’s thematisations of absence and presence and think particularly about how framing might relate to the presentation of grief. While I will thus seek to ‘read’ Ida’s frames in certain ways, I simultaneously keep open the possibility that the film continually performs, in part through its framing, what falls away from vision and knowledge. I will return to this towards the end of this chapter; first, it is time to plunge into some of the ways in which the film configures historical loss, and from there move towards explicating grief.

Returning to (One’s) Birthplace Numerous ‘returns’ pervade Ida and its production context, inscribing the film with multiple evocations of ‘pastness’. The film marks the return of Pawlikowski to his birth place in Poland, a country that he left as a teenager.15 In its use of black and white photography and meditative pacing, the film also partially returns to an art cinema that was flourishing in the period in which Ida is set.16 Thematically, the film treats what Blacker has called ‘the “return” of a suppressed Jewish identity’ (2016, 135). In its presentation of the women’s return to the village of Ida’s birth to seek material traces of the past, Ida draws on some of the characteristics of Holocaust ‘documentaries of return’ (Insdorf 2003, 300), including Łoziński’s Birthplace. There are numerous differences between Ida and Birthplace. The fact that the latter is a documentary and the former a fictionalised narrative with a broader scope is perhaps the most obvious, but not necessarily the most significant. As mentioned above, Birthplace is unequivocal about Polish responsibility and the contemporary persistence of mechanisms of violent ‘othering’, while Ida’s ambiguity and silences have been seen as evasive (Graff 2013). However, Ida does share a number of preoccupations with Birthplace: the return to a provincial space of origin, the search for traces of loved ones, the investigation into the deaths of family members who were killed by Polish Catholic neighbours, and the excavation of remains from the earth. In Chap. 3, I considered Insdorf’s argument that in ‘documentaries of return’ it is the place that may ‘no longer know’ the returnee (Insdorf 2003, 300). Similarly, I drew on Trigg’s description of a

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return to a childhood home, which is now ‘indifferent’ and ‘no longer reciprocates our memories’ (2012, xxvi). Chapter 3 argued that one can take these statements in a number of ways; most obviously, they can refer to the point at which the inhabitants of a place no longer remember you, or deny remembering you, or are hostile to your presence. These formulations are also relevant to Ida. Throughout the film, Ida and Wanda are faced with others’ forgetting (whether feigned or real is not always clear). In the village bar, for example, neither the barman nor the elderly customer who watches them admits to knowing the Lebensteins. Upon Ida’s first return to her homestead, Mrs Skiba insists that she knows nothing about who lived in the house before the war; more disturbingly, Ida is placed in the extraordinary situation of having to bless the infant descendent of those who killed her own parents when Ida herself was an infant. In this moment, Ida’s connection with her homestead (as a child born to parents who owned the home) and her Jewish heritage are threatened with erasure. Ida’s and Wanda’s encounter with Szymon is instructive in its presentation of material, almost palpable, obstructions to ‘coming-to-know’ the past. The women have difficulty finding Szymon but eventually locate him in a hospital. Wanda’s first words to him are ‘remember me?’. Szymon’s eyes are unfocused, and he looks at her only with great effort, his breathing heavy and laboured on the soundtrack. At first, he seems to mistake Ida for Róz˙a, before stating: ‘I hid them in the forest…fed them’. He offers nothing further after Wanda’s suggestion that he then killed them. The scene emphasises the materiality of Szymon’s ailing body: his cracked voice, his ragged breath, and the micro-movements of his bulging eyes and open mouth in a body that appears almost paralysed. The materiality of his body seems to obstruct the emergence of his memory, reminding us of the powerful associations between the earthy matter that conceals remnants of the past and the bodies of people whose memories must be, in a sense, excavated. Another way in which ‘place’ itself can appear to be inhospitable or ‘indifferent’ to one’s memory is in the framing of space, and the (former) home that one returns to is a particularly potent site of such tensions. In Ida, as in moments in Birthplace, ways of framing space coincide with the hostility shown by the village’s inhabitants. In our first glimpse of the farmstead in Ida, the house, and the skeletal trees in its yard, is shot from a slightly low angle (Fig. 5.4). The building is set starkly against an expanse of grey sky and dark earth, with a power cable diagonally severing the image, drawing a line through it, as though cancelling it out. The house is

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Fig. 5.4  Ida: the negated home

physically there, but the ‘home’ is negated. The house, having been forcibly taken from Ida’s family in a murderous economy, is still used by Feliks as part of a system of exchange. Wanda’s and Ida’s encounters with the villagers recall some of Grynberg’s more hostile meetings with the residents of his birth place. In their initial encounter with Feliks, he guards the doorway of the home, blocking the entrance with his body. The framing here is resonant: as Feliks insists that ‘no Jews ever lived here’, he appears alone in the frame. Standing behind a wall, Wanda is present, but not initially visible to the viewer. Thus, Feliks appears to be talking to the empty air, as though his attempt to erase her family’s past is contiguous with a denial of their present existence. Wanda must both physically force her way into his home, and figuratively past his repudiation of their existence. During her subsequent interrogation of Feliks, the composition described above is reversed. Now we see only Wanda, while Feliks is hidden from the viewer by an interior partition, another literal impediment to our vision that resonates

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figuratively with the blocking of truth’s visibility. As the women leave the house, Wanda comments on how the Skibas’ neighbours have turned up during their meeting; we can see two bystanders, half out of the frame. This is a brief indication of the pervasive ‘gaze of the neighbour’ that I outlined in Chap. 2. As in the other films discussed in this book, the gathering of villagers is indicative of hostility, threat, and the policing of the often unspoken directives to keep silent about past and present crimes.

From Earth to Earth Ida stages its return to Birthplace most powerfully in the scene of excavation where, as in Łoziński’s film, layers of earth are physically dug through in order to extract the remains of loved ones from unmarked graves or ‘non-sites of memory’ (Sendyka 2013). As in Birthplace, Ida’s excavation sequence draws us both towards and away from human concerns, variously framing the posthumous environment as inhospitable landscape, tangible materiality, and a kind of non-anthropocentric realm in which the human is entirely decentred. The excavation sequence begins with a long-­ shot framing a field, forest, and sky, which appear more as grey-toned layers than inhabitable space. The landscape is nearly abstract, refusing to give the spectator a comfortable purchase on the place being shown and making it difficult to orient ourselves in relation to it. At the same time, even the vast block of sky seems to have a material weight, hanging oppressively over the characters as they enter from screen right as indistinctive figures (Fig. 5.5). The framing here extends the atmosphere of inhospitality, of being rejected by place, that the film’s composition and narrative has suggested in previous moments. It recalls a similar extreme long-shot from Birthplace, in which the bystanders situated around the pit from which Abram Grynberg’s remains have just been extracted appear miniscule, while masses of swampy field and cloudy sky dominate the composition. These landscape shots in both Ida and Birthplace emerge at the point in the films where human remains are unearthed, and thus at a moment of significant emotional investment. They suggest, however, the ways in which matter might ‘impede or block’ human desires (Bennett 2010, viii), while also resonating more specifically with the collective Polish hostility towards Jewish Poles displayed in both films. The second shot in Ida’s excavation sequence shows a vertical layering of shades of black and grey: the forest that we had glimpsed at the edge of the field. There is little indication of scale until the characters enter from

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Fig. 5.5  Ida’s posthumous environment as inhospitable landscape

screen right and proceed through trees that periodically impede our vision of them. The trees recede into the depths of the image, while the branches in the foreground seem to poke through the screen with an almost palpable force, ‘surging forth’ towards the viewer, to appropriate Didi-­ Huberman’s words (2005, 271). The third shot in this sequence, of more trees and a mound of dirt, also appears initially unpeopled, before a head emerges unexpectedly from the earth. The viewer must re-orient themselves both spatially and temporally, for the head belongs to Feliks, who has, in an ellipsis, already dug a substantial hole in the ground. In these three shots that precede the unearthing of the bones, the space is established as pre-existing the characters’ entry into it, framed first as (both abstract and tangible) layers, and only secondarily as narrative space or container for human actions. As in Birthplace, the process of excavation in Ida is not one of full disclosure, where everything becomes visible or understandable. The unearthing (both physical and figurative) is fraught with uncertainty and

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haunted by what is still un-framed. Ida stages elisions and obstructions through framing and editing at the very moment that the characters appear to find what they seek. In an aural echo of Birthplace, Feliks’s shovel strikes bone with a sickening crack, after which there is a disorientating temporal ellipsis. Wanda reaches below the edges of the frame and brings from off-screen the small skull of her son, which must have been cleaned as it is entirely free from dirt. We don’t see how the bones are removed from the earth with which they have mingled through the disintegration of the flesh; the film seems to circumvent the reduction of the human to ‘brute matter’. Most of the disturbing indices of decomposition fall away into the ellipsis. It is this ellipsis itself, the rend in the temporal linearity of the film, that enacts a moment of shock. After so much searching and waiting, Wanda is suddenly bringing the skull into visibility. She cradles it and wraps it in her headscarf, in an echo of the way in which Grynberg brought himself face-to-face with his father’s skull. It is as though each figure re-enacts the gesture that they might perform for the living person. Once the remains are excavated, both Wanda and Grynberg turn their backs to the camera and to the grave sites. It is impossible for them to be drawn into further face-to-face encounters. When Feliks delivers his confession, it is from within the earth itself, crouching in the hole that he has dug. This is a powerful image of the earth as a kind of material archive. As in Birthplace, memory seems to be brought forth alongside the breaking open of the ground, as though the sediment that has covered the physical remains, and the layers of truths and obfuscations, were being excavated together. In their silent materiality, excavated bones call for a framing through human discourse, a narrativisation (Prager 2015, 61). However, both the process of excavation and of human contextualisation is imperfect, haunted by what cannot be called forth and made visible. By the time Feliks makes his confession, the remains have been excavated. For the entirety of his monologue, they are lying just out of frame, which we do not realise until Ida picks them up and brings them into the visual field. The frame remains rigidly static, making us aware, retrospectively, of what was situated at the periphery of the visible, and what might still lie there. Once again, we can think about such moments of framing in a wider figurative sense, as gesturing towards the non-visibility of particular kinds of Jewish murders, which have been out of the frame of official discourse for decades, though now revealed to be lying just beneath its edges.

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While in Birthplace the excavation halts the film, with a sense of the depletion of all possibility, Ida’s narrative continues beyond it. After the unearthing of the remains, Wanda announces her intention to drive to Lublin and rebury them in their family plot. The Jewish cemetery is dilapidated; gravestones are crooked and overgrown. This posthumous environment has been made obsolete, pushed to the margins of visibility. Wanda and Ida are forced to bury their dead not only clandestinely, but also in a crude and improvised manner; we watch them dig a hole in the ground, place the wrapped remains inside, and push dirt back into the hole with their bare hands. In close-up, the image of hands pushing at the dirt is held for several seconds, as earthy matter once again covers over the human fragments. Ida crosses herself at the makeshift grave, lifting the remains conceptually out of their rough materiality and into a framework that is meaningful for her. However, while the dirt that stubbornly clings to her fingers and sprinkles onto her habit may be consecrated, it also partakes of material decay. Later on, in a very different context, Ida will repetitively pose the question: ‘and then?’17 Such a question is relevant here too. What can come after? After the remains are reburied, what happens to the new knowledge that has emerged during the film’s excavations?18 This knowledge, too, becomes subject to a reburial of sorts, as it is kept inside Ida and Wanda, who are unable or unwilling to share or acknowledge it. For Wanda, there seems only to be a return to a kind of voided existence, from which she will soon remove herself entirely in her leap through the window. For Ida, too, her first return to the convent is a return to enforced silence that encourages an erasure of everything that had come ‘before’. In this context, it is useful to consider the scene in which Ida and Wanda drive away from the cemetery after the reburial. As they are shown in the car, all diegetic sound is muted, as though it has drained out of the frame, and we can hear the same quiet, subtle score that had been layered over parts of the excavation. The two women and the car’s interior are heavily silhouetted; the most significant illumination comes from the front windshield, which frames a series of small boxes of light in the middle of the otherwise murky image (Fig. 5.6). As the women drive, this box expands, so that we can see trees and the road ahead. The light seems slightly overexposed, and contrasts with the dark interior. It may be tempting to interpret this image as showing the women moving from darkness to a light that signifies knowledge or transcendence. However, as Brinkema (2014, 110) reminds us, light, rather than necessarily signalling ‘enlightenment’

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Fig. 5.6  Ida: light framed by shadows in Wanda’s car

or ‘illumination’, might at times also be a void, a ‘vacant centre, stag[ing] precisely nothing.’ The oversaturated tones of the road ahead threaten to white-out parts of the image as much as the darkened interior seems to be blacking-out the foreground. In its composition of boxed and framed black and light sections, this image echoes a number of others in the film, such as the granules of sugar spilled around a black centre mentioned in the opening of this chapter (Fig. 5.1). These compositions form part of a network of partially voided images, in which loss is staged at the heart of the material.

Heavy Grief Ways of responding to loss in Ida vary. Ida’s way of coping with loss accords somewhat with Freud’s conception of the work of mourning. For Freud, mourning is a comprehensible response to loss which dissipates as the subject learns to detach her feelings from what is lost (Davis 2007, 132). In the face of loss, Ida is productive: she seeks to visit her parents’

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graves and to summon a priest for a reburial ceremony. What I have described above as Ida’s becoming-Wanda (drinking her vodka, smoking her cigarettes, wearing her clothes) might also be formulated as something between ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ the loss of her aunt, incorporating elements of Wanda’s life into herself in a kind of experimental catharsis.19 While Freud initially opposed mourning to melancholia, as the pathological condition of remaining attached to what is lost, his later writings retreat from definitive distinctions between the two.20 Brinkema has argued that it is in part the slipperiness of the concepts of mourning and melancholia in Freud’s own writings that sets the stage for a ‘muddling’ of these notions in much contemporary theory (what she terms ‘mournincholia’) (2014, 66). Melancholia, once the domain of ceaseless negative affectivity, is frequently recuperated as a way to establish an active, open engagement with the past and to maintain modes of remembrance. Negative affectivity is ‘put to work’ and made to become meaningful in some way, and pain ‘is neutralized in the very act of being put to work, for the peculiarly painful is also the peculiarly purposeless’ (70). Grief is the term she uses for that pain which ‘resists the relational dimension of loss; the form for that suffering of a general economy in which not everything can be made to mean’ (71). The pain of grief, Brinkema insists, is ‘non-­ recuperable’ (70). In this light, one could argue that rather than mourn or engage in a productive melancholia, Wanda grieves—stupefyingly, ceaselessly and irrevocably. Etymologically, grief is associated with a certain kind of heaviness: ‘Grief is derived from grever (afflict, burden, oppress), from the Latin gravare (to cause grief, make heavy)—hence, the etymological intimacy of grief and gravity, both from gravis (weighty)’ (Brinkema 2014, 73). The ‘strange and heavy agony’ of grief, Brinkema argues, can permeate mise-­ en-­scene and framing (73). This suggestion opens up another way of reading Ida’s framing of characters at the bottom edges of the screen: the human figures become pulled downwards by the formal heavy pressure of grief, while the space above them bears down with a material weightiness. Such a reading is suggestive even when the characters do not necessarily grieve, but otherwise display sorrow. For example, when Ida watches her fellow novices take their vows, in a ceremony she withdrew from, she closes her eyes as a tear falls down her face. Her face is only half-visible at the edge of the frame. However, formal and psychological grief do coincide powerfully in Wanda’s moments of anguish. When she attempts to elicit a confession of murder from Szymon, Wanda is framed in close-up

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while she hoarsely speculates on the murder of her son. Her head steadily droops downwards onto her chest, moving further and further towards the edge of the frame until only half her face is visible. Her body is dragged downwards in weighty suffering. To return to the crux of Brinkema’s point, however, it is not only in moments of human suffering that Ida’s aesthetic is charged with a sense of grief; at particular moments, the film itself seems afflicted by such suffering. It is in the cinematic tableau that Brinkema locates the most explicit manifestation of the structure of grief. The form of the tableau ‘organizes the image around the heaviness of grief’, its stasis becoming a refusal to transform pain into a productive state of mourning (Brinkema 2014, 56). Many of Ida’s shots have the stilled quality of the tableau, as though movement has been weighted down by sorrow’s gravity. Frequently only micro-movements disrupt the inertia of these shots, for example, a sheet flapping in the wind in an otherwise still composition, a shovel-full of dirt flung across an otherwise static frame, or a curl of cigarette smoke in an empty room. These localised movements serve to emphasise the stillness of everything else in the frame at that moment.

Troubled Vision Grief is a matter of light as well as of weight, or rather, of light’s loss. Brinkema traces a tradition in philosophical writing of associating grief with disruptions of visibility. She writes: ‘death deprives one of the vision of the other who is lost, and, in a larger sense, deprives one of the illuminating possibilities of light, visibility, and untroubled vision’ (2014, 54). Grief distresses vision and visibility and makes loss painfully present. In Ida this manifests itself in a number of ways; the characters not only lose sight of their loved ones but they also lose the privilege of being looked at by them in return. They lose the vision of the other. This is particularly significant in relation to Ida, who in the convent is not looked at as an individual. In several brief long-shots depicting life in the convent at the beginning of the film, Ida is often virtually indistinguishable from the nuns. Two particular moments of dialogue further the impression that Ida has been somehow unseen. First, after the reburial as they say their farewells outside the convent, Wanda says to Ida: ‘it’s a shame that Róz˙a cannot see you’.21 Throughout the film, Wanda comments on Ida’s appearance, as though Ida is in the process of becoming visible to others, yet her parting lament reminds us of the absence of the look of the lost loved one.

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Secondly, as they converse on the terrace outside the Piaski hotel, the hitchhiking saxophonist Lis says to her: ‘you probably have no idea what you look like’.22 This, too, suggests the absence of a look or regard onto the self; Ida has not been the focus of anyone’s vision, including her own. After their conversation, Ida takes off her habit and loosens her hair, looking intently straight ahead; presumably she is in front of a mirror, though none is visible in the frame. That Ida would not previously see herself as an object of an erotic gaze (that of Lis, for example) is unsurprising given her upbringing in a convent. Nevertheless, this scene intersects with the wider problematic of vision that comes with loss. As afore-mentioned, through showing us photographs of Róz˙a, the film has suggested that Ida and her mother are identical; Ida’s unawareness of her own appearance is thus also associated with not knowing her mother’s face. By removing from the frame any trace of the mirror into which Ida looks at herself, her moment of self-reflection appears more as a look towards the viewer, as though she were posed in a photograph, further echoing the appearances of Róz˙a in the film’s photographs. In seeing herself, perhaps she (and the viewer) is also seeing her mother, a figure whose traces within Ida’s facial features underscores her absence from Ida’s life. Formally and conceptually, the film at such times evokes a rend in the visible, an ‘absence at the heart of the point-of-view’ to use Wylie’s term (2009, 278). One could counter these suggestions that Ida has been in some way ‘unseen’ by suggesting that she is in fact the focus of a kind of regard: that of God. For a believer, God is all-seeing and omniscient. The first images of the film are three different perspectives onto Ida as she faces a statue of Jesus, delicately restoring his face with a paintbrush. For Vredenburgh, this scene indicates that Ida ‘literally sees eye-to-eye’ with Jesus (2016, 4). After she is told she must visit her aunt, Ida is shown lying in bed in a mid-­ shot taken from above. She kisses the medal on her chain and looks upwards. The next shot shows the statue of Jesus, also framed in mid-shot; the editing suggests that she is imagining herself under the gaze and protection of God. When she spends the night in the parish, the film cuts from Ida sitting on the camp bed to a low-angle view of a religious figurine, while the next shot seems to show her gazing at it. After returning from the trip with her aunt, Ida eventually realises that she cannot go through with her vows. We watch her pacing outside, in front of the statue of Jesus, from a high angle; only a portion of the back of the statue is visible in the corner of the frame. She asks for forgiveness, addressing the

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statue, before the film cuts to a long-shot of two still figures in the featureless yard: Ida with her head bowed, and the wooden statue above her. These moments showing Ida looking at religious statues indicate the spiritual direction of her thoughts. One could presume a reciprocity at work in these moments; for example, we can imagine that the statues are ‘looking back’ at her, indicating that she is under the gaze of God. However, if the film hints at the promise of reciprocity, it doesn’t ever confirm its fulfilment; it is possible, instead, to read these moments as questioning rather than confirming Ida’s belief that God sees all, and more specifically, sees her. In the first moments of the film, Ida’s face is visible as she looks into the face of the statue of Jesus; at this point, however, the camera is trained on the back of the statue, which appears as a lumpy mass of wood (Fig. 5.7). We don’t see what Ida sees—quite literally, and perhaps also in the broader sense of not seeing the omnipotence of God’s gaze. When the film cuts later to the newly restored statue while Ida is lying in bed, the statue is framed so that it seems to look out at us.

Fig. 5.7  Ida face-to-face with Jesus

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However, its frontal positioning in the dark is desolate and disconcerting. The eyes are hollows in the shadows, and the stillness of the framing emphasises the lifelessness of this wooden figure in which so much is invested. The statue faces us but simultaneously seems to be in the act of withdrawing, as though, to borrow Didi-Huberman’s words, the body of Christ is retreating ‘before us in a kind of refusal to remain visible’ (2005, 175). Didi-Huberman is writing here about Albrecht Dürer’s image of Christ, the woodcut entitled Man of Sorrows (1509–1510), which ‘knows how to gaze at the viewer without recourse to anything in the way of eye contact’ (2005, 175). It is precisely the image’s ‘presentation of withdrawal’ that may ‘grip’ and ‘take hold of us’ (175). What we are ‘gripped’ by in viewing Ida might be religious certainty, but might equally be a denigration of faith. Though heeding Didi-Huberman’s point that the gaze between a religious figure and its viewer need not align in order to provide the feeling of being looked at (and indeed, this is central to the idea of anamorphosis as it has been taken up in this book), it is significant that the film consistently refuses to align the direction of Ida’s look and the position of religious statues (or their eyes). There is always some kind of interference at play. Acts of devotion, as Eshelman (2017) points out, are depicted as ‘radically off centre’. For example, in the parish accommodation, the statue’s head is turned away from her, while in the convent’s yard, when Ida announces her decision not to take her vows, the camera is positioned part-way up the featureless back of the statue, which is decapitated by the framing. Thus, although Ida fervently looks towards God and seems to believe that he is looking back at her, the film’s composition, framing and editing nevertheless leave open the possibility that she is directing her look towards something that does not, in fact, look back. The framing dislocates, suggesting a lost gaze, a troubled vision. It is not coincidental that the prayer card that Ida carries with her, which depicts Jesus, rhymes visually with the photographs of Róz˙a. These material objects are held and touched throughout the film, similarly framed in close-up, and encapsulate their own dynamics of loss: of a mother, of the gaze of the other, of one’s certainty in one’s own identity, and perhaps of faith.

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Photographic Grief Brinkema (2014, 76) finds the ‘fullest picture of grief as something radically different from mourning’ in the writing of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, in which the author meditates on his mother’s death. Barthes’s grief is, in this text, figured as suffering without the potential to be made meaningful. In front of the photograph of his mother as a child (the famous Winter Garden photograph which is not, incidentally, made visible for the reader), he writes ‘I suffer, motionless […] I cannot transform my grief […] the Photograph—my photograph—is without culture: when it is painful, nothing in it can transform my grief into mourning’ (Barthes 2000, 90). It is not just the photograph as an image of something that provokes suffering, however. Rather, it is the very structure of the photographic itself that embodies the problematic of grief. In Barthes’s text, the suffering of loss and grief come to be thought of as a photographic structure (Brinkema 2014, 76). The photograph, writes Barthes, is an emanation of the light that touched a body and now ‘touches me’: ‘the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star […] light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed’ (Barthes 2000, 80–81). With the loss of the ‘being’ comes the loss of the light that may touch one through the photograph; this presence will never again materialise in the photograph, or be touched by the light that will afterwards touch the person who looks upon it. In commenting on Barthes’s writing, Derrida highlights the intertwining of the material with the immaterial (or spectral) at work in these passages: When Barthes grants such importance to touch in the photographic experience, it is insofar as the very thing one is deprived of […] is indeed a tactile sensitivity. The desire to touch, the tactile effect or affect, is violently summoned by its very frustration […] like a ghost [un revenant], in the places haunted by its absence. (Derrida and Stiegler 2013, 38)

I discussed spectrality in Chap. 4; here I want to emphasise how this knotting together of the tactile and the intangible in photography resonates with Ida’s interlacing of presence and absence, material plenitude and loss. In Ida, the photographic is a privileged mode for the structuring of grief, in three overlapping ways: first, through the presentation of the film

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itself as not unlike an old photograph, secondly, through the use of photographs as actual objects within the film, and, thirdly, through a particular network of images in which photographs are linked within the film to other ways of capturing and framing light, namely windows. In relation to the first category, Ida’s 1.37:1 aspect ratio, black and white tones, and frequent moments of stasis recall photographs from the period. The film was shot digitally but printed on 35mm film, which heightens its photographic quality, recalling more powerfully Barthes’s conception of loss as a photographic structure. Photographs as actual objects recur in a number of significant ways. As mentioned above, when Ida learns of her Jewish heritage, we are shown a photograph of Róz˙a cradling the baby Ida in her arms (see Fig.  5.2). Wanda places the photograph on the kitchen table in front of Ida. This piece of photographic ‘evidence’ is immediately affected by the film’s decentering and troubling of visibility. The photograph is filmed lying askew and with some parts of it out of focus; its colouration matches the scratched and stained wooden table. While material textures ripple through this shot, the image captured in the photograph has a spectral quality. The photograph almost looks like a double exposure. Róz˙a and Ida barely emerge from the background, giving the impression of figures who are not quite substantial enough to have distinct outlines. At another point, we see an image of Róz˙a on her wedding day that is similarly both immaterial and tactile; it is scratched and bent, containing the material traces of its history of being handled over time. It is instructive at this point to recall Marks’s writing on the recollection-­ object, which I discussed in Chap. 3. For Marks, recollection-objects are irreducibly material objects that preserve the indexical trace of forgotten or repressed histories. In linking the photographic to the fossil, her work draws close to the idea of ‘material witnessing’ developed in the recent posthumanities (see Chap. 2). She writes: Fossils are created when an object makes contact with the witnessing material of earth. Photographs are created when light reflected by an object makes contact with the witnessing material of film. In both cases, this contact transforms the material’s surface so that it becomes a witness to the life of the object, even after the latter has decayed. (2000, 84)

As material and indexical objects, the photographs in Ida bear witness to the past presences of Wanda’s family, preserving their traces in light.

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Feliks’s confession and the excavated bones both seem to emerge from the ‘witnessing material of earth’, threading these moments together in a network of impressionable surfaces (of the earth, of film). What is borne witness to, however, is not easily translated into structures and narratives of meaning and knowledge. If I use the word ‘witnessing’ here, it is not to imply full visibility, untroubled vision or easily assimilated meanings. Before her death, we see Wanda arranging her collection of photographs on a table, as though they were a puzzle that she was putting together, attempting to frame them in particular patterns (Fig. 5.8). As she handles the photographs, Wanda’s fingers rest on an image that she has just inserted near the bottom of the frame—it is of a young boy, possibly her son. When Ida asked earlier about a boy in a photograph (‘did I have a brother?’), Wanda was unwilling or unable to discuss it. Now, this image stops her in her tracks, and the film too: the scene quickly cuts. Wanda may touch these ‘fossils’, but it is the loss of their subjects that overwhelm. It doesn’t matter how one arranges the photographs, the suggestion seems

Fig. 5.8  Wanda touching her photographs in Ida

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to be, they fail to sublimate grief, as the Winter Garden photograph failed to do so for Barthes. The figures in the photographs gaze to camera, and out at her, but, of course, the gaze of the other is lost. Not coincidentally, re-arranging her photographs is one of the last actions that we see Wanda performing before committing suicide.

Loss Traced in Light As a way of capturing and framing light and darkness, the photograph can be linked to the window, which also becomes entangled within formal structures of grief and loss in the film. The window, and its projection of light onto other surfaces, is a recurring visual motif in Ida. Frequently, however, we see either the light cast by the window, and not the window itself, as, for example, at moments in the Mother Superior’s office or the women’s hotel room. Or, alternatively, we see the window, but as a square of framed light that does not allow for a seeing-through to the outside world. The window does not always frame the outside world into presence, nor always suggest depth, but might instead simply be filled with blocks of light, as in Szymon’s hospital room. In frequently removing one element of the equation (the window casting light, or the window framing the outside world), Ida’s windows become a key part of the presentation of loss, where something (the window or the outside world) is missing from the visual field. Róz˙a’s stained-glass window is a vital part of this network of images (Fig. 5.9). Early in the film, Wanda tells Ida that her mother used to make stained-glass windows and put them in the barn ‘to make the cows happy.’ When they travel to their old farmstead, Ida

Figs. 5.9 and 5.10  Ida: Róz˙a’s stained-glass window, and its light touching Ida

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discovers the stained-glass window in the cowshed. At this moment, there is a quiet, brief tinkling on the audio track, as though we can ‘hear’ the glass; a subtle musical undertone is also held throughout this scene. Particularly amidst their difficulty in getting anyone to admit that they remember Róz˙a, the window becomes an indexical trace of her denied presence, formed in light, like a photograph. The film shows how the light through the window briefly illuminates Ida, how the light ‘touches’ her, as though literalising Barthes’s afore-mentioned formulation (Fig. 5.10). The window, made up of fragmented panes of mottled glass snaked through with heavy black lines, is an image of fractured light. It echoes the arrangement of photographs that Wanda made on the table (see Fig. 5.8). Those slips of captured light, indexical traces of presence, were also divided by dark lines, in this case, of the table underneath. And they also seemed to arrive to us as fractured pieces of some kind of lost whole. Didi-­ Huberman has offered a phenomenological reading of stained glass, noting that it gives ‘the tactile sensation of being touched by colour’ (2005, 34). For the viewer, however, colour is precisely what is missing from Ida’s stained-glass window; colour becomes another ‘absent presence’, as Vredenburgh notes (2016, 3). The viewer’s encounter with the stained-­ glass window (which fills the frame for a few seconds of screen time) becomes a privileged moment in which we must think presence and absence together, the ‘fabric of representation’ ‘with its rend’ (Didi-­ Huberman 2005, 144). When Wanda enters the barn, she interrupts the reveries of both Ida and the film’s audiovisual form. The music abruptly stops. Wanda comments: ‘this is so Róz˙a. Coloured glass next to cow shit’. In this formulation, the stained glass, commonly associated with religion and transcendence, is situated amidst the opposing element of meaningless animal excrement, the kind of mess that Trotter termed ‘illusion-­ destroying’ (2010, 165), signalling a ‘declassification of meaning and value’ (2000, 326).23 The scattered sugar on the kitchen table that Ida encounters after Wanda’s death is also an example of this kind of illusion-­ destroying mess (see Fig. 5.1). It might index Wanda’s presence, but it is also purposeless mess to be discarded (and Ida does so). Trotter writes: ‘sugar in a jar is a substance on tap: ready to be made useful […] sugar dumped on the kitchen counter is just so much grit […] an excess of matter over meaning’ (2010, 157).24 Such mess is ‘matter out of place’ and purposeless, constituting ‘an anti-system by which we are made to see, not meaning and value, but their opposite, or limit’ (2007, 51). Both the

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excrement in the barn and the sugar on the table are suggestive of the presence of this anti-system. This particular vision of mess, and its potential failure to become meaningful, can be connected with grief’s resistance to recuperation by meaning. Where mourning might be useful or purposeful, grief, like mess, is unproductive and unable to be put to use. As Joan Didion writes (cited by Brinkema 2014, 74), in grief one encounters ‘the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.’

Endings: ‘The Road of Time’ An aesthetic of grief, in its heaviness, troubling of vision and shadowing of light with darkness, contours many of the film’s frames, but it is not possible to impose a single interpretative framework across the film’s form as a whole. The ending in particular upsets such attempts. After spending the night with Ida, Lis invites her to accompany him on tour, and then, perhaps flippantly, into married life. Instead, in the morning Ida puts on her habit and leaves. We see her striding purposefully along the street with her suitcase, until the film cuts to its final shot of Ida walking along a country road. Ida is filmed frontally, squarely facing the camera and walking towards it, as the camera moves backward to keep her in frame. Far from the still frames we have become used to, the image shakes and jerks. Both her body and the frame seem to vibrate with energy. After about a minute, we hear Busoni’s slow and contemplative piano transcription of Bach’s ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’, a definite contrast to the abstract and subtle non-diegetic music that we have heard before. Ida continues to walk, and be tracked by the moving camera, for approximately another minute before the film cuts to black. It is reasonable to assume that Ida is returning to the convent, and leaving the pleasure-seeking society behind. In terms of a politics of memory and identity, the return to the Catholic Church has a number of problematic associations. On the one hand, churches and convents were involved in sheltering Jewish children like Ida during WWII; on the other hand, the Polish Catholic Church as an institution has been plagued by accusations of anti-Semitism (for which there is much documentation) and inactivity in the face of Jewish deaths in the Holocaust.25 Further historical research into these matters has stalled in part because the Church archives in Poland have long been shut to independent investigators (Grabowski 2013, 83). As I suggested, the Church in Ida is associated with forgetting and

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non-­disclosure, and her return to the convent might be seen as a convenient ‘ironing-out of a troubling crease’ (Blacker 2015) as her Jewish identity is erased. For Grynberg (n.d.), Ida’s probable return to the convent, seen alongside Wanda’s suicide, lends a ‘pessimistic moral’ overtone to the film, as ‘both its Jewish heroines are lost.’26 The fact that the film does not explicitly visualise her return, but rather ends in motion on the road, might also suggest that there is no settled place for Ida. Regardless of its particular slant, any such interpretation must necessarily condense the scene’s unfolding. I suggest instead that we remain with this ending a little longer and open out our analysis to time. The scene itself, arguably, is more an opening than an ending, infused with a new vitality. I have argued that, for Didi-Huberman, it is in part the time spent with an image that sets meaning and interpretation into flux. When we look at a painting ‘for a long time’, he writes, ‘the progressive deduction of a general symbol is never wholly possible, insofar as the image often proposes to me only thresholds to shatter, certainties to lose, identifications to, at a blow, call into question’ (2005, 180). His account of how we might confront Fra Angelico’s painting highlights the importance of temporal flux: if, in our hurry to ‘read’ the fresco, we are tempted to see as unimportant our first impression of the light and the painted wall, then he proposes instead that we ‘stay a moment longer, face to face’ with these material elements (2005, 13). This state of ‘suspended attention’ involves ‘letting oneself be grasped by’ the image, and ‘letting go of one’s knowledge about it’ (16). As outlined in Chap. 2, Didi-Huberman’s proposition that we remain with images longer causes difficulties for a medium that seems to incessantly replace one image with another. As Fowler has argued, however, the long-take presents film scholars with a productive opportunity to engage with the concept of ‘suspended attention’ (2017, 247). Combined with a slowness of activity in the frame, the long-take ‘breaks down the expectative gaze’ (2017, 243) and places viewers in a state of suspension. It is this mode of viewing that Ida’s ending also encourages. Although the image is not still but emphatically moving, viewers must nevertheless remain with the unfolding of Ida’s single primary action—walking down the road. As we do so, our own responses to the image might also change, moving through impressions, questions, emotions, affects and projections; interpretations that are dispersed or deployed ‘in several dimensions’ (DidiHuberman 2005, 16). Once again, we may turn to Bergson to further illuminate this process. As Bergson wrote, ‘there is no feeling, no idea, no

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volition, which is not undergoing change every moment’; ‘my mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration it accumulates’ (Bergson 2007, 1). The viewers’ ‘road of time’ and Ida’s road of space and time might move in parallel, conjoin and separate. We may, of course, decide on a single, symbolic interpretation of the ending at any point. But in its duration, we must also exist, as DidiHuberman writes, ‘before’ the image, conceptualized as ‘a visual event’ rather than a representation that is ‘susceptible to having ever more knowledge drawn from it’ (2005, 228). This chapter has suggested that categories and symbols might become unfixed through duration, as gradations of identity unfold, and our understanding of what we thought we knew (about Anna, about Wanda, about Feliks, about the past in general) is opened out to change. As a number of commentators have pointed out, some of the ways in which these changes occur are highly problematic for thinking about Polish history, as Jewishness and Communism, or perpetration and rescue, blend and blur together. The chapter has largely analysed the film through the lens of art history and philosophy, not to abstract it from socio-political critiques, but rather as a mode of analysis that might run parallel to them. The problematic of thinking ‘with’ that I have suggested the film raises, and the way in which it encourages an approach that braids together ‘knowledge’ with ‘not-knowledge’ (Didi-Huberman 2005, 1), is relevant to wider questions relating to Poland’s responsibility for its Jewish past, present, and future. How do we think, together, the ways in which Poles were victimised under German occupation during WWII ‘with’ the incidents of Polish lethal violence, looting and aggression towards Jewish victims that scholarly research continues to discover? What should come after the unwanted knowledge of Jedwabne and Polish perpetration? These are, indeed, questions that all of the films that I discuss in this book raise, though in very different ways. Ida, ultimately, does not provide an answer. It leaves us quite literally against an uncertain horizon, left with the same question as Ida herself: ‘and then?’

Notes 1. Brinkema aims to separate grief as an affect from the psychological experiences of characters and considers how it manifests itself through film form. This separation is part of her wider critique of affect theory, which, she argues, tends to over-invest in the ‘interiority of a feeling subject’ and

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neglect the specific formal structuring and aesthetic properties of affects, which necessitate close reading and interpretation (Brinkema 2014, 23, xvi). While my own close reading here continues to be interested in bodies and interiorities, Brinkema’s focus on formal structures and aesthetics has inspired many elements of my approach to film form in this book. 2. Graff (2013), for example, argues that Ida’s aesthetics and its focus on the private and the spiritual distracts us from its failure to critically engage with Polish-Jewish history. This escapism, she argues, is mirrored in approaches to the film that valorize its aesthetics and ambiguity. 3. For examples of political and historical critiques of the film, see Dunin (2014, 2015), Graff (2013), and Wigura (2013). A particularly revealing exchange was carried out between Datner and Graff (2013) on the one hand, who critiqued the film for its anti-Semitic stereotypes and objectionable politics, and Varga (2013) and Sobolewski (2013) on the other, who praised the film’s beauty and dismissed Datner and Graff. Skaff (2018) and Bill (2015) have provided a useful précis of many of the responses to Ida in the Polish and international press. 4. American jazz in particular marks an aural space apart from state socialism and its Soviet patriotic fare. 5. The film is, however, set in the years before the mass Jewish migration from Poland following the Polish government’s anti-Semitic campaign in 1968. 6. Pawlikowski has stated that the character of Wanda was partly inspired by Helena Wolińska-Brus, who he described as a ‘charming old lady’ whom he met at Oxford. He was shocked to learn that she had been a Stalinist prosecutor responsible for the show trials and executions of prominent figures in the non-Communist, anti-German Polish resistance (Home Army, or Armia Krajowa), including General Emil Fieldorf (Levine 2015). Wanda’s nickname ‘Krwawa Wanda’ (‘Bloody Wanda’) echoes the nickname of Julia Brystiger, ‘Krwawa Luna’ (‘Bloody Luna’), a Jewish highprofile member of the Stalinist security service who was notorious for torturing prisoners. In 2016, Ryszard Bugajski made a film entitled Zaćma/Blindness based on elements of Brystiger’s life, which shows her as a figure haunted by her past and attempting to gain absolution from the members of the Catholic Church that she had persecuted. The film’s treatment of guilt, religion and history would make for a fascinating comparison with Ida, though this is beyond the scope of this book. 7. The Polish Council to Aid Jews with the Government Delegation for Poland was part of the Polish Underground State under German occupation whose mission was to provide assistance to and rescue Jewish people in and outside of ghettoes. In her pamphlet entitled ‘Protest!’ published underground in 1942, co-founder Zofia Kossak-Szczucka called upon Poles to exert their Catholic duty in rescuing Jewish people, despite main-

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taining that Jewish people were an ‘enemy’ within Poland (Irwin-Zarecka 1989, 158). 8. I have also put forward this argument in Temporality and Film Analysis (2012, 70). 9. Sutton and Martin-Jones make note of a common example of how we tend to measure change: ‘looking back at photos of ourselves as children, we can immediately see the difference between ourselves then and ourselves now’, but it is much more difficult to ‘capture and measure the continuous process of change’ (2013, 89). 10. Bergson himself considered that the spatialisation of time conducted by the intellect was akin to the working of the ‘cinematograph’, which he saw as a kind of clockwork mechanism that abstracts duration into measurable space. Bergson was writing at a time when cinema was in its infancy, and a number of theorists, including Deleuze in his Cinema books, have sought to address the ways in which Bergsonian duration and cinematic time can nevertheless be thought together. I provide a short account of this dialogue in Temporality and Film Analysis (2012, see pages 36–41  in particular). 11. Rydzewska (2017) also points to the blurred ‘demarcating line’ between categories and identities, though in relation to the dichotomy between characters who have sinned, and those who have inherited sin. Drawing on Derrida, she finds a ‘palimpsest of violent acts that are difficult to trace and unequivocally ascribe’. 12. Although this chapter will touch upon some of the questions relating to Ida’s theological significance, this is not my primary focus. See, instead, Rydzewska (2017), who considers the film in relation to the ‘postsecular constellation’ in European cinema, and Eshelman (2017), who reads the film through the phenomenology and theology of Jean-Luc Marion. 13. Abrams points to the way in which Elie Wiesel grappled with ‘the theological significance of the Holocaust as “the site and occasion of [God’s] abdication”’ (2014, 151). 14. Faith itself can also be seen as a holding open of the contradictory positions of knowing and not-knowing, seeing and not-seeing. I am grateful to Joe Kickasola for pointing this out. 15. Rydzewska (2017) has pointed out that questions of origins, returns, and identities recur throughout Pawlikowski’s films, citing the ‘director’s preoccupation with issues of the redefinition of identity, of where one comes from and issues of belonging’. See also Ostrowska (2007). In setting the film in the early 1960s and drawing on the era’s jazz and pop audio cultures, Pawlikowksi returns to the era of his youth, as he discussed in interview (Levine 2015). 16. For example, Ida’s jazz soundtrack resembles that of Knife in the Water (Polański, Poland, 1962), as does its images of characters filmed through

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the car windscreen. Some of the visual iconography (stark, geometric images of nuns arranged in patterns) of Mother Joan of the Angels (Kawalerowicz, Poland, 1961) is echoed in Ida. The film also draws on European art cinema, such as the films of Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman. See further Kosmala (2018) and Szaniawski (2015). 17. Ida says this twice in response to Lis’s suggestions that she come to Gdańsk with him, marry him, and have children with him. 18. In Aftermath, which I discuss in Chap. 4, these questions are explicitly raised in conversation between the two brothers who have discovered the mass grave in their town: what to do with the newly-excavated remains, and what to do with the newly-discovered history of the town? Can both simply be reburied? 19. LaCapra (1998, 45) agues that, rather than being strictly opposed activities, acting-out ‘may be a necessary condition of working-through’ for certain individuals and in certain circumstances. 20. See Ricciardi (2003, 3–4, 32–33) and Brinkema (2014, 60). 21. She speaks in the present tense, using ‘cannot’ (‘nie moz˙e’) rather than ‘could not’ (‘nie mogła’). 22. This is mistranslated in the English subtitles of some versions of the film as ‘you probably have no idea of the effect you have, do you?’ 23. Mess, waste, litter and their relationships with meaning are explored further in Chap. 6. 24. Trotter is here writing about Lynne Ramsay’s Gasman (UK, 1998), in which sugar makes an appearance. Startlingly, Barthes also mentions sugar in rejecting the idea that the photograph contributes to the ‘sweetness’ of memory: ‘The photograph is violent […] because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so)’ (Barthes 2000, 91). 25. See, for example, Libionka (2010) and Zubrzycki (2006, 58–59). 26. See also Janicka, who argues that the final removal of the Jewish characters performs an anti-Semitic ‘cleansing’ of Poland from Jewishness (2013).

References Abrams, Nathan. 2014. Polanski, Kubrick, and the Reinvention of Horror. In Religion in Contemporary European Cinema: The Postsecular Constellation, ed. Costica Bradatan and Camil Ungureanu, 145–165. New  York and London: Routledge. Bar-On, Dan. 2001. The Bystander in Relation to the Victim and the Perpetrator: Today and During the Holocaust. Social Justice Research 14 (2): 125–148. Barthes, Roland. 2000. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage.

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Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bergson, Henri. 2007. Creative Evolution. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bill, Stanley. 2015. Review of ‘Ida’: Identity and Freedom. Notes from Poland, January 9. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://notesfrompoland. com/2015/01/09/review-of-ida-identity-and-freedom/. Blacker, Uilleam. 2015. Poland’s Jewishness: The Polin Museum of Polish Jews and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida. UCL SEES Research Blog. Accessed 11 December 2017. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/2015/02/03/polands-jewishness-thepolin-museum-of-polish-jews-and-pawel-pawlikowskis-ida/. ———. 2016. The Return of the Jew in Polish Culture. In Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts, ed. Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner, and Christiane Wienand, 125–140. London and Oxford: Bloomsbury. Brinkema, Eugenie. 2014. The Forms of the Affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bugajski, Ryszard. 2016. Zaćma/Blindness. Poland. Chmielewska, Katarzyna. 2017. Subtelność Idy. In Debaty po Roku 1989: Literatura w Procesach Komunikacji, w Stronę Nowej Syntezy (2), ed. Maryla Hopfinger, Zygmunt Zia ̨tek, and Tomasz Żukowski, 321–326. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN. Wydawnictwo. Datner, Helena, and Agnieszka Graff. 2013. My, komisarki od kultury—polemika z Varga ̨. Krytyka Polityczna, 13 November. Accessed 19 April 2020. https:// krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/film/datner-graff-my-komisarki-od-kulturypolemika-z-varga/. Davis, Colin. 2007. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2017. A Thousand Plateaus. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. 2013. Spectographies. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 37–51. London: Bloomsbury. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2005. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Dunin, Kinga. 2014. Okrutnie dobre siostry. Krytyka Polityczna, 20 December. Accessed 13 April 2020. https://krytykapolityczna.pl/felietony/ kinga-dunin/okrutnie-dobre-siostry/?fb_comment_id=71210410555494 2_712138565551496. ———. 2015. Chamy, Polacy, Żydzi i esteci. Krytyka Polityczna, 3 March. Accessed 13 April 2020. https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/ dunin-chamy-polacy-zydzi-i-esteci/.

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Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Tobias. 2015. Locked Doors and Hidden Graves: Searching the Past in Pokłosie, Sarah’s Key and Ida. In Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-­ First Century: Memory, Images and the Ethics of Representation, ed. Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer, 141–160. New  York and Chichester: Wallflower Press. Engelking, Barbara. 2011. Jest Taki Piękny Słoneczny Dzień…: Losy Żydów Szukaja ̨cych Ratunku na Wsi Polskiej 1942–1945. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagłada ̨ Żydów. Eshelman, Raoul. 2017. Jean-Luc Marion’s Postmetaphysical Phenomenology and Film: An Analysis of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Ida. Apparatus, 4. https://doi.org/10.17892/app.2017.0004.66. Forecki, Piotr. 2015. “Mienie poz˙ydowskie” jako figura Polskiego dyskursu publicznego [“Post-Jewish Property” as a Figure of Polish Public Discourse]. Środkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne 4: 75–90. Fowler, Catherine. 2017. Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with Georges Didi-Huberman. In Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, ed. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit, 241–254. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fulbrook, Mary. 2019. Bystanders: Catchall Concept, Alluring Alibi, or Crucial Clue? In Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, ed. Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs, 15–35. New  York and Oxford: Berghahn. Glowacka, Dorota, and Joanna Zylinska. 2007. Introduction. Imaginary Neighbours: Toward an Ethical Community. In Imaginary Neighbours: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, ed. Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska, 1–18. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Grabowski, Jan. 2013. Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-­ Occupied Poland. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Graff, Agnieszka. 2013. “Ida”  - subtelność i polityka. Krytyka Polityczna, 1 November. Accessed 29 April 2020. http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/ artykuly/film/20131031/graff-ida-subtelnosc-i-polityka. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Grynberg, Henryk. n.d. The Aftermath, Ida, etcetera. The American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies. Accessed 26 April 2020. http://www.aapjstudies.org/ index.php?id=209. Insdorf, Annette. 2003. Indelible Shadows: Films of the Holocaust. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. 1989. Neutralizing Memory: The Jew in Contemporary Poland. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Janicka, Elz˙bieta. 2013. Ogon, który macha psem. Krytyka Polityczna, 25 November. Accessed 29 April 2020. Krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/film/ janicka-ogon-ktory-macha-psem.

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Kawalerowicz, Jerzy. 1961. Matka Joanna od Aniołów/Mother Joan of the Angels. Poland. Kosmala, Kinga. 2018. Ida and Mother Joan of the Angels: God-like Camera and Women in Habits. Tarnowskie Dialogi Naukowe 12: 8–20. LaCapra, Dominick. 1998. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Lauder, Robert E. 2014. Bergman Meets Bresson. Commonweal 15: 39. Leder, Andrzej. 2015. Leder o “Idzie”: nadpalone. Krytyka Polityczna, 19 March. Accessed 29 April 2020. http://www.krytykapolityczna.pl/artykuly/ film/20150317/leder-o-idzie-nadpalone. Levine, Sydney. 2015. Interview: dir. Paweł Pawlikowski on his Oscar-Shortlisted Film ‘Ida’. Accessed 26 April 2020. https://blogs.sydneysbuzz.com/ inter view-dir-pawel-pawlikowski-on-his-oscar-shor tlisted-film-ida62c25ad5b3d1. Libionka, Dariusz. 2010. Polish Church Hierarchy and the Holocaust—An Essay from a Critical Perspective. In Holocaust: Studies and Materials, ed. Jan Grabowski, 76–127. Warsaw: Polish Centre for Holocaust Research. Łoziński, Paweł. 1992. Birthplace/Miejsce Urodzenia. Poland. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Durham: Duke University Press. Mazierska, Ewa. 2010. Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. McMahon, Laura. 2012. Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis. London: LEGENDA Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. Mroz, Matilda. 2012. Temporality and Film Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ostrowska, Dorota. 2007. Kinesthetics: Cinematic Forms in the Age of Television. In European Cinemas in the Television Age, ed. Dorota Ostrowska and Graham Roberts, 144–158. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pasikowski, Władysław. 2012. Pokłosie/Aftermath. Poland/Russia/Netherlands. Pawlikowski, Paweł. 2013. Ida. Poland/Denmark/France/UK. Polański, Roman. 1962. Knife in the Water. Poland. Prager, Brad. 2015. The Act of Digging: Archaeology, Photography and Forensics in Birthplace and Holocaust by Bullets. In Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Memory, Images and the Ethics of Representation, ed. Oleksandr Kobrynskyy and Gerd Bayer, 59–75. New York and Chichester: Wallflower Press. Ramsay, Lynne. 1998. Gasman. UK. Ricciardi, Alessia. 2003. The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rydzewska, Joanna. 2017. Transnarodowość, postsekularyzm i tajemnica winy w Idzie Pawła Pawlikowskiego/Transnationalism, postsecularism and the enigma of guilt in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013). In Kino Polskie Jako Kino Transnarodowe, ed. Sebastian Jagielski and M. Podsiadło. Kraków: Universitas.

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Accessed 29 April 2020. https://www.academia.edu/35526791/_2017_ Transnarodowosc_postsekular yzm_i_tajemnica_winy_w_Idzie_Pawla_ Pawlikowskiego_Transnationalism_Postsecularism_and_the_Enigma_of_ Guilt_in_Pawel_Pawlikowskis_Ida_2013_._In_S._Jagielski_M._Podsiadlo_ Ed._Kino_polskie_jako_kino_transnarodowe._pp._23-40_._Krakow_ Universitas. Sendyka, Roma. 2013. Pryzma—zrozumieć nie-miejsce pamięci (non-lieu de mémoire). Teksty Drugie 1 (2): 323–344. Skaff, Sheila. 2018. Studying Ida. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing. Sobolewski, Tadeusz. 2013. “Ida” i “antysemickie klisze”? Sobolewski polemizuje z Graff i Datner. Gazeta Wyborcza, 14 November. Accessed 19 April 2020. https://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,14947235,_Ida__i__antysemickie_klisze___ Sobolewski_polemizuje.html. Steinlauf, Michael C. 1997. Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Sutton, Damian, and David Martin-Jones. 2013. Deleuze Reframed. London and New York: I. B. Tauris. Szaniawski, Jeremi. 2015. Benefits of the Doubt: Pawlikowski’s Ida and the Taste(s) of Ambiguity. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://www.academia. edu/11032531/Benefits_of_the_Doubt_Pawlikowski_s_Ida_and_the_taste_ s_of_ambiguity. Trigg, Dylan. 2012. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: University of Ohio Press. Trotter, David. 2000. Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. Cinema and Modernism. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2010. The Uses of Phobia: Essays on Literature and Film. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Varga, Krzysztof. 2013. Piękno pod pręgierzem. Gazeta Wyborcza, 7 November. Accessed 19 April 2020. https://wyborcza.pl/piatekekstra/1,12915 5,14913929,Piekno_pod_pregierzem.html. Vredenburgh, Steven. 2016. Finding God in Pawlikowski’s Ida. Religions 7: 72. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7060072. Wheatley, Catherine. 2014. Film of the Week: Ida. Accessed 28 April 2020. https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/film-week-ida. Wigura, Karolina. 2013. Ida Raising Tempers. A Review of the Discussions Around Paweł Pawlikowski’s Film. Kultura Liberalna, 26 November. Accessed 13 April 2020. https://liberalculture.org/ida-raising-tempers-a-review-of-thediscussions-around-pawel-pawlikowskis-film/. Wylie, John. 2009. Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34: 275–289.

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Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2006. The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Żukowski, Tomasz. 2018b. Archeologia nostalgiczna i archeologia krytyczna. In Opowieść o Niewinności. Kategoria Świadka Zagłady w Kulturze Polskiej (1942–2015), ed. Maryla Hopfinger and Tomasz Żukowski, 389–436. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN. Wydawnictwo.

CHAPTER 6

A Film Found on a Scrapheap: Abjection, Informe and It Looks Pretty from a Distance

As a painter and filmmaker, Wilhelm Sasnal has frequently turned his attention to everyday scenes of contemporary existence, including life in the Polish provinces (Majmurek 2015, 100–101).1 Before making It Looks Pretty  From A Distance (Sasnal and Sasnal 2011),  Wilhelm and Anka Sasnal spent two years visiting Zielona, a small village near Kraków, where they recorded preparatory documentary-style footage on which the fiction film was based (Ruszczyk 2012). Co-produced by the Anton Kern Gallery in New  York, the film depicts a decaying and hostile rural community whose residents collect and sell scrap materials. When Paweł, one of the villagers, mysteriously disappears, his neighbours strip his home of anything of value; when he just as suddenly reappears, his girlfriend stabs him and leaves him for dead. There is little here to indicate what the filmmakers consistently discussed in interviews: that the film emerged from, and speaks back to, the moment of ‘shock’ that they had upon reading Gross’s Neighbours, and also upon watching the ways in which the book was attacked in Poland (Ruszczyk 2012). The ‘main thought’ that inspired the filmmakers during filming, according to their editor Beata Walentowska, was the fact that ‘we have not settled the accounts with the past’, and, as such, ‘certain things can happen in Poland even now’ (Walentowska 2015, 95). The filmmakers refer to specific works of history, including Gross’s writing on the Jedwabne pogrom, the looting of Jewish property and desecration of corpses, and Engelking’s work on the persecutions, betrayals © The Author(s) 2020 M. Mroz, Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7_6

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and violence that frequently met Jewish people seeking shelter with their non-Jewish neighbours in rural Poland (Ruszczyk 2012). The film does not attempt to reconstruct rural wartime pogroms, nor represent Polish complicity in Jewish death during the Holocaust. Such events are nevertheless referenced by particular moments in the film. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s approach to allegory, and Michelle Langford’s adoption of his work in her conception of the cinematic ‘allegorical-­image’, I will argue that such moments of citation offer themselves up to an allegorical reading. In such a reading, the process in which the non-Jewish Paweł is robbed, rejected from the community, and murdered, refers allegorically to similar operations of othering, mechanisms of greed, and forces of violence suffered by the village’s Jewish citizens during the war.2 Lest this allegorical reading sound too straightforward, it must be noted that Benjamin’s (and Langford’s) conceptions of allegory do not posit simple or fixed associations between one thing and another; instead, allegory endlessly defers meaning. Rather than necessarily shedding light on historical associations or providing viewers with enlightening interpretations of particular filmic scenes and images, allegory might instead plunge us into an ‘entangling darkness’ (Benjamin 1998, 197). In attempting to work through some of the allegorical associations that the film offers up, however, I also want to suggest the possibility of a more radical counter-force operating within the film, which I associate with the work of Bataille rather than Benjamin: an operation of destabilising, debasing, formlessness.3 In their influential work Formless: A User’s Guide, Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois (1997, 31) identify the informe with ‘whatever does not lend itself to any metaphorical displacement, whatever does not allow itself to be in-formed.’4 In the process of the film’s unfolding, I will argue, allegorical associations become subject to a ‘dissipation, an entropic compulsion’ where things and meanings lose their outlines and contours (Ffrench 2017, 165). There has been much discussion about the compatibility of Bataille’s informe with Kristeva’s notion of abjection, which is the other conceptual framework that structures my reading of It Looks Pretty.5 Much of this debate seems to hinge on whether the abject should be seen as ‘matter’ and the ‘subject matter’ of art (usually the excremental substances of the body) or as a structure, a process of (imperfect or failed) exclusion. If one is to read the abject as producing a thematics of essences and substances, then this, as Krauss and Bois (1997, 245) argue, ‘stands in absolute contradiction to the idea of the formless’ as a corrosive operation. It is also as

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excremental matter that abjection has primarily been framed in film studies, ‘not surprisingly’, writes Elsaesser, ‘given cinema’s sensory appeal and visceral effects’ (Elsaesser 2018, 144).6 It is not my intention to rehearse the complexities of the debate here. My close reading of It Looks Pretty is more concerned with its movements towards meaning—those points where (allegorical) frameworks of signification might crystallise with the images in front of us—and with its dissolutions of such frameworks, whether through the pull of abjection towards the ‘place where meaning collapses’ (Kristeva 1982, 2) or the ‘splitting apart of meaning from within’ performed by the informe (Krauss and Bois 1997, 245). At the same time, my use of abjection focuses less on bodily emissions (though they do feature) and more on abjection as a structure or operation, which manifests itself in continual gestures of failed or imperfect expulsion and rejection. The film gives us a glimpse of an abject heterocosm in which nothing is entirely expelled. The psychological, material and affective structures behind wartime atrocities persist as excremental remainders. Mechanisms of othering, structures of hatred and greed, and forces of violence are, in this village, continually recycled. It is apt, then, that the villagers’ only source of employment seems to be reprocessing scrap material, while remnants of failed recycling attempts (rusted car parts, shattered bricks) lie strewn across yards. The film itself, I argue, seems to be made up of ‘scraps’ of footage, linked only loosely together, replete with blurred images and corroded by over-exposure. As such, it resonates with another film set in an abject heterocosm, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (France, 1967), which announces itself as a ‘film found on a scrapheap.’ This is a rather ironic characterisation of both films, which have been, as Silverman and Farocki note in relation to Weekend, ‘constructed with the care of the artisan’ (1998, 85). Yet, in the case of It Looks Pretty, this epithet resonates not only with the film’s form, but also with the wider structures of expulsion and rejection that operate within it. Via a taxonomy of waste, litter and mess adopted from David Trotter, this chapter will plunge into It Looks Pretty’s scrapheap to search, as ever, for those points where material objects and forms might have value (as in scrap matter designated for further use) and where they seem to lead us to the very limits of our ability to inscribe them with meaning (as in the film’s bodily emissions). This process is as much about making meaning from objects, as it is about making meaning from the ‘scraps’ of film footage that we are provided with.

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Allegory: First Approach Before writing a more detailed shooting script for the film, the Sasnals began work with a poem written by Anka (Walentowska 2015, 92).7 It is worth dwelling on the poem at some length, as it further elucidates the ties to Gross’s work and aspects of Polish-Jewish history. Titled, like the film, ‘It Looks Pretty From A Distance’, the poem describes a muddy and overgrown river in which people bathe in the summer, before declaring that ‘Two women and three children drowned in the river/First the women/Threw the children into the river and then jumped/Out of fear’. In the meantime, the poem continues, crowds of people waited on the bank with ‘Pitchforks stones and knives’ (Sasnal 2015, 88). This reference to the women and children drowning in the river has been described by Anka Sasnal as a ‘citation’ from Gross’s Neighbours (Ruszczyk 2012). In that book, the event in question is initially raised in the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn describing the Jedwabne pogrom. Wasersztajn observes that, a couple of weeks before the pogrom, he saw two Jewish mothers drown themselves in a nearby pond ‘rather than fall into the hands of [Polish] bandits […] Assembled hooligans made a spectacle of this’ (Wasersztajn cited by Gross 2003, 17). This horrific moment is also described in the opening sequence of Arnold’s …Where is My Older Son Cain? (1999) (see Chap. 1). In a rare moment of dialogue mid-way through It Looks Pretty, a young boy tells his father that he had heard about people having drowned in the nearby river. The father, Posłaniec, confirms this, saying: ‘during the war. Out of fear. Three kids and two women. First they drowned the kids. Then they drowned themselves’. In a dismissive manner, he adds, ‘But they weren’t Poles’, and the scene ends. There is only one further explicit reference to the war in the film: when sorting through the possessions looted from Paweł’s house after his disappearance, Posłańcowa briefly inspects a soup ladle, and says, ‘she [Paweł’s mother] must have been keeping this since the war. We’ll give it to the priest, he’ll have something to serve soup to his guests with.’ I will come back to both of these scenes in due course. For now, it is worth listening to what these moments leave unsaid. Posłaniec makes the drowning incident sound like a self-contained event that involved only the women and children, despite the vague reference to ‘fear’. He leaves out what is made explicit in the poem, which is the complicity of the villagers in instilling this fear with their ‘pitchforks

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stones and knives’ (weapons often associated with rural violence). Nor does he specify that the victims were Jewish. The incident with the soup ladle is even more nebulous, yet also suggestive. In a film where dialogue is scarce, there is a clear attempt here to link a relatively valuable object (good enough to give to a priest) with the specific context of a war during which, it has already been suggested, the Jewish residents were killed. The poem, again, goes further, and explicitly points to how the Polish villagers sought out the hiding places of their Jewish neighbours in the search for things ‘of value’. It describes how people ‘burrow[ed] like animals’ in the forest in their attempts to hide, while the now-elderly residents of the village ‘dug up/the forest. Scooped out the hollows./Even today you can still find something if you dig deep/enough […] Greed’s still there […] People are searching elsewhere’ (Sasnal 2015, 88). It is not too much of a stretch to consider that the ladle might be a ‘post-Jewish’ object, previously looted by Paweł’s family.8 In the film, these two brief references to the war are shadowed only by vague hints of Polish complicity; they are on the opposite end of the spectrum from the explicit discussion in the Sasnals’ interviews (the poem, in this schema, would lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum: the villagers’ greed is established, but their murderous actions are only indicated). If we ignore the chronology of production for a moment, and think about moving from the interviews, through the poem, and into the film itself, we can see a gradual emptying-out of content and context: there is an un-reconstructed heart of atrocity in the film, around which its images circulate. Context and content aid us in establishing meaning and making sense; their absence has the potential to undermine these attempts. As Chare (2011, 150) has argued, drawing on Adorno, contextualising images of atrocity can be dangerously transfigurative, creating a ‘sense where there should only be non-sense […] Horror, if it is to be felt, should not be contextualised, should not signify.’9 Kristeva (1982, 154) expresses a similar view: suffering and horror emerge in abject literature in ways that resist representation, if by that we mean the ‘desire to coincide with the presumed identity of what is to be represented’. The abject is, instead, ‘an impossible ob-ject, a boundary and a limit […] a drive overload of hatred or death’ which prevents images from crystallising into representations. Instead, they ‘break out’ into sensations of suffering and horror (Kristeva 1982, 154). Given this emphasis on non-signification and non-contextualisation, it might initially seem peculiar that I view this film through the framework

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of allegory, which arguably concerns itself with the multiplication, rather than suppression, of contexts.10 Yet it is partly through the allegorical mode that the past suffering and horror ‘break out’ of the film’s images. Bypassing direct representation, the contemporary actions of the villagers and their structures of exclusion, violence and murder lead us toward a past horror that must be felt and imagined by viewers ‘for [them]selves’, to return to Didi-Huberman’s formulation (2008, 3). The ‘capacity to sustain a complex relationship between conflicting temporalities’ is a significant feature of Benjamin’s much-discussed work on allegory (Langford 2006, 55). Past and present, disparate times and things, can, in allegorical readings, ‘flash up to confront each other directly’ (Langford 2006, 75). This vocabulary of flashes finds its echo in Kristeva’s ‘breaking out’. Both terms suggest something violently, momentarily, marking its presence beyond the represented image. It Looks Pretty, then, does not show us explicitly how Jewish Poles may have been treated in villages; it does not reconstruct the exact events, but rather makes visible their contemporary recycling. In this allegorical scenario, Paweł comes to occupy the position of the expelled ‘other’, filling the gap left behind by the Jewish villagers who previously served this purpose in the structure. When Paweł disappears, it is his possessions that are taken. The scenes of looting are suggestive in their depiction of a mass mentality of greed and violence which has presumably been operating in the village for decades, blurring the boundaries between ‘bystanders’ and ‘perpetrators’. The whole village, it seems, arrives silently to take away anything they can carry; they move as one mass of practiced scavengers. These scenes take place at night, under the ‘cover’ of darkness, which, along with the hand-held camera that shoots these scenes, de-­individualises the villagers. As allegorical moments, these scenes sustain ‘seemingly incommensurable temporalities’ within them (Langford 2006, 75). There is not  only the suggestion of wartime looting in the past, but also the future becoming-secret of the episode playing out in front of us, blanketed by the silence and darkness of complicity: no one will talk about this, just as they don’t talk explicitly about the past looting, but everyone will know. This, too, is resonant with how wartime violence and looting became an ‘open secret’ within the villages in which it took place.11 Paweł’s murder upon his return to the village is an allegorical echo of the hostility and violence faced by many Jewish people whose possessions had been appropriated by those who did not want to return them.12 (Recall, for example, the suggestion in Birthplace that Henryk Grynberg’s

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father was murdered for his cows.) As such, It Looks Pretty has an important precursor in Jan Jakub Kolski’s debut feature, Burial of a Potato (Poland, 1990). This film is also set in a small Polish village, albeit immediately after the war, as Mateusz, a non-Jewish man returning from a concentration camp, finds that in his absence his neighbours have distributed his possessions amongst themselves and are plotting to steal his land. Mateusz is ‘accused’ by his neighbours of being ‘a Jew’; like the brothers in Aftermath, he assumes the position of a Jewish person subject to anti-­ Semitic attacks. Mateusz’s neighbours initiate a series of aggressive measures to dissuade him from attempting to reclaim his land: one of his farm buildings is set on fire, his animals are burned alive, and he is shot at. For the villagers, redefining Mateusz as Jewish positions him not as an insider returning to his own home, but ‘as an intruder who disturbs the peaceful life of the village’ (Pakier 2013, 123). The film’s association between Mateusz and Jewishness begins to reveal the ‘psychological mechanism’ (Pakier 2013, 123) behind the othering of the Jewish Pole, the mass complicity in this action, and some of its potential consequences. Although Mateusz is not literally Jewish, in being treated as though he were, the film gestures allegorically towards how Polish villagers may have treated Jewish Holocaust survivors. In the context of the ‘unwelcoming’ of the Jewish survivor, it is worth pausing, as indeed It Looks Pretty itself does, on the image of Paweł’s house after the looting (Fig. 6.1).13 It stands as a gutted ruin: there are holes in the roof around which birds swoop, and gaping voids where windows used to be. The house functions here as an allegorical-image, what Langford (2006, 78) has called a ‘rune, a hieroglyph to be deciphered’, which encourages the viewer to ‘adopt an allegorical way of seeing in order to read the image, to draw the allegorical meaning to the surface’. One can read in this building how ‘post-Jewish’ homes were rendered uninhabitable for their returning owners, and the in-hospitable attitudes of their new (non-Jewish) owners. In Ida (Pawlikowski 2013), too, the framing of the appropriated homestead is, as I argued in the previous chapter, imbued with hostility. In It Looks Pretty, the house becomes a literal and allegorical ruin, aptly, since the ruin is central to Benjamin’s conception of allegory. It is through the ruin, which he terms the ‘allegorical physiognomy’ of history, that history enters German tragic drama (his particular focus): ‘in the ruin history has physically merged into the setting’ (Benjamin 1998, 177–178). The river in It Looks Pretty is a central landscape of Jewish death, and, much like the large pond in Jedwabne shown in Cain, it seems to bear no

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Fig. 6.1  Paweł’s ruined home in It Looks Pretty

physical traces of the suffering that occurred there. Unlike the spaces, discussed previously in this book, where decomposed bodies have altered the soil composition and visibly affected the vegetation on the site, It Looks Pretty’s river seems to return us to the notion of a silent landscape into and through which Jewish people have ‘vanished’. We may become aware instead of the ‘powerful non-presence—the nothingness—of the absent dead’ (Listoe 2006, 52). For Listoe, post-Holocaust landscapes in which we ‘see nothing’ because there is no longer anything to be seen also allows us to sense that we see nothingness, ‘the no-place of death’ (56). It is this nothingness, saturating the ‘petrified’ landscapes of history that, in Listoe’s Benjaminian reading, ‘conjures allegories’ (69). In It Looks Pretty, this allegorical conjuring crystallises around a number of scenes set at the river. However, these scenes suggest that, while we may see very little in this posthumous environment, violence remains and is continuously recycled. For example, in one scene, Paweł and Mirek arrive at the river bank to find a group of young people already on the other side. With no provocation, Mirek shouts at them to ‘piss off’, and they retreat. The next time Mirek arrives at the river, he only needs to look at the group on the other side, mobilising the threatening ‘gaze of the neighbour’, before they leave. These people, it seems, are ‘others’, not from their village. The scenes thus

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replay historical structures of exclusion and hostility in a minor key. The river bank is the last place where Paweł is seen before he disappears, which stretches the allegorical chain of suggestion further between the incidents in the past and the present, and between Paweł and the Jewish victims, with the inter-village hostility forming a bridge in between. Towards the end of the film, we are also shown how the villagers must cross the river in a rusty punt to reach their church. This small circumstance seems rich with allegorical association: with the deaths of the Jewish villagers under these waters, their own ethno-religious identity has been strengthened and preserved, and the repression of the past Jewish identity of the village is reconstituted in every church visit. Having suggested some of the potential allegorical resonances behind particular moments from the film, it must nevertheless be pointed out that there is nothing ‘within’ the film that would confirm such readings. Associations between the village’s past violence and the present processes of othering are hinted at, but there is no fixed allegorical framework in which a viewer could input images and scenes and be presented with a neatly packaged parcel of signification. For Langford (2006, 64), displacements and slippages are characteristic of allegory; allegorical-images might encourage us to interpret them, but the ‘revelation of concrete meaning that one might expect to emerge from them […] will invariably remain deferred.’ Allegories are not only textual strategies, but also modes of reading and viewing, and are thus subject to the endless destabilisations that spectatorship introduces. Since cinematic allegories are a form of ‘assemblage’ between filmmakers, films and viewers, ‘they are in a constant state of flux or becoming due to the fleeting and dialectical nature of meaning’ (Langford 2007, 8).14 In the reading of It Looks Pretty that follows, I will begin to put more pressure on questions of allegorical meaning and signification. Even allowing for a slippery and diffuse vision of allegory, the film at times moves us towards something much more inchoate, towards, that is, the operational destabilising of the informe. We will arrive at this point, however, via a discussion of abjection.

The Abject Heterocosm The continual attempts by It Looks Pretty’s villagers to expel what is deemed ‘other’ to the (individual and collective) ‘self’ has led me to consider this film in relation to Kristeva’s account of abjection which, broadly speaking, refers to bodily and psychological revolts against that which

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threatens one’s material and psychological boundaries. The state of abjection describes a failure of complete expulsion; the abject is ‘something rejected from which one does not part’, a continually threatening, ambiguous border (Kristeva 1982, 4). After Kristeva, the abject has often been equated with the ‘physical demonstrations of abjection […] with piss, shit, vomit, viscera and corpses’ (Chare 2011, 5). In Kristeva’s work the relationships between the substances of abjection and the structures of abjection are complex, yet it is important to note that she attempts to separate the ‘object’ from the ‘abject’. ‘When I am beset by abjection’, she writes, ‘the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object’ (Kristeva 1982, 1). Her elucidation of this is particularly relevant to this book’s focus on meaning, as the (im)possibility of meaning is precisely what separates ‘ob-ject’ from ‘ab-ject’. While an object ‘settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning’, ‘what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (1982, 1–2). Abjection is a ‘safeguard’, something that is mobilised to protect the subject from the absence of meaning. When such safeguards collapse and one is unable to ‘radically exclude’, as I argue happens in It Looks Pretty, one may find oneself becoming crushed under ‘a weight of meaninglessness’ (Kristeva 1982, 2). Kristeva’s writing on abjection emerges from her understanding of the structure of the unconscious, yet her work also allows for a reading of states of abjection in a variety of historical circumstances.15 In relation to collective and social systems, she proposes that abjection may follow the same logic as it does for the individual, ‘with no other goal than the survival of both group and subject’ (Kristeva 1982, 68). When Kristeva suggests that abjection may be caused by disruptions of identity, order, borders and rules, this has a legal, moral and social aspect which has often been overlooked (Chare 2011, 80). Amongst her examples are ‘the traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience’, the ‘immoral, sinister, scheming and shady’, and ‘a friend who stabs you’ (Kristeva 1982, 4). Any crime, she argues, ‘because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility’ (1982, 4). More recently, Elsaesser (2018, 136) has considered how violence or discrimination that depends on a ‘troubled self-other dynamic’ is highly resonant with conceptualisations of the abject. He briefly outlines this in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflicts, where the abject is invoked ‘in

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competing claims to land, property and nationhood’ (Elsaesser 2018, 141). Israelis and Palestinians have frequently, he argues, been cast as ‘each other’s abjects’ within an intimate relationship ‘fed by hatred, not love’ (2018, 141). Both communities can be seen to rely on the exclusion of the other for their self-definition. There are resonances here for the Polish-Jewish relationship, if we take into consideration the immense power imbalance between Polish and Jewish citizens leading up to, during and after the war. The division between ‘self’ and ‘other’ was particularly significant to the formation of Polish self-identification, and Jewish people were frequently perceived as an alien element within Polish society (Michlic 2006, 4). As Gitelman (2003, 273–274) points out, Jewish people served as the ‘perfect out-group’ for Catholic Poles; they were often resented even as their visible differences from other Poles dissipated with increased assimilation. For Kristeva (1982, 185), anti-Semitic discourse shows how ‘the Jew’ becomes a danger precisely in this realm of ambivalent relations, ‘where exact limits between same and other, subject and object […] [are] disappearing’. Jewishness becomes associated with the abject, with rotten waste, which must be cast out to protect society’s moral, social and economic hygiene (Kristeva 1982, 185). If we consider that abjection may emerge from the ambiguous relationship between self and other—in one’s betrayal by a friend, in one’s becoming subject to the violent scheming of a neighbour, in the unapologetic appropriation of one’s possessions by an immoral community—we can see that It Looks Pretty quite literally performs these elements. The Girl is the ‘friend who stabs’ Paweł. Allegorically, the film gestures beyond the particular incidents staged in It Looks Pretty and allows us to think about the wider resonances of Polish betrayal of Jewish neighbours, as forms of abject ‘intimate violence’ (Aleksiun 2017). On the basis of numerous reports and diaries from the Holocaust, Engelking (2011, 153) has concluded that, for the betrayed Jewish Poles, it made a ‘huge difference’ that they were about to die because of the direct actions of their former friends and neighbours. ‘It is significant whether we are betrayed by a neighbour […] or whether we are killed by a stranger’, that is, in the context of WWII, a German (2011, 153). ‘Betrayal by an acquaintance heightens the disillusionment in humanity’ (2011, 153), it leads us towards the point where the meanings that we have invested in our communities collapse.16 In a number of different ways, then, abjection is ‘the foul lining’ (Kristeva 1982, 20) of the community in It Looks Pretty. What I particularly want to emphasise in this section, and what will be taken forward to

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inform the rest of the chapter, are the structural aspects of acts of failed expulsion. The Jewish villagers may have been killed, Paweł may have been expelled, but something fundamental has remained in this village, namely, the operations of violent and murderous othering, and the forces of greed and betrayal, which are continually activated in both minor skirmishes (as in the contemporary incidents at the river) and more significant contexts. Long after the wartime atrocities, ‘the economy of desire, the map of affective tensions behind those events’ (Majmurek 2015, 107) persist as the excremental remainder. Turning again to Sasnal’s poem, we are reminded that ‘even today’ people are digging for things of value, for loot. There is ‘nothing of value. After all these years’, but because ‘greed’s still there’ ‘people are searching elsewhere’ (Sasnal 2015, 88). Paweł’s disappearance only makes more visible the cycle of greed, hatred and murderous violence that has never been expelled from this village.

‘A Thin Film’: Abjection and Film Form Kristeva (1982, 141) has argued that, in abject literature, ‘the narrative web is a thin film constantly threatened with bursting.’ She continues: ‘when narrated identity is unbearable, when the boundary between subject and object is shaken, and when even the limit between inside and outside becomes uncertain, the narrative is what is challenged first. If it continues nevertheless, it proceeds by flashes, enigmas, short cuts, incompletion, tangles and cuts’ (141). In Kristeva’s writing, it is narrative that is the ‘thin film’ that barely contains a seething horror. In It Looks Pretty, and via a play on Kristeva’s words, the film itself can also be seen as ‘thin’ and threadbare. Scenes are linked only loosely together, narrative threads are frayed, and psychological motivations are either absent or opaque.17 Some causation is present (Paweł’s disappearance ‘leads to’ the villagers taking his things) but explanatory frameworks are largely absent. Indeed, it is as though the (seemingly) central events that the film raises—the deaths of the Jewish villagers, the question of ‘post-Jewish’ property, and scenes that might explain the disappearance and reappearance of Paweł—are vacated from the film. These gaps are necessary if the film is to function allegorically. Yet beyond this, the film gives the impression that we are watching scraps of footage that didn’t make it into what could have been a more ‘conventional’ or ‘commercial’ film of narrative and causation: we see the discarded, abjected scenes from the scrapheap, roughly edited together.18

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This scrappiness applies to particular takes as well as to the structure of the film as a whole, as though the film is presenting us with frames that would normally be discarded. Editor Walentowska (2015, 94) stated that, in putting together the footage, the technical deficiencies of given fragments did ‘not exclude the possibility of incorporating them into the film’, giving as an example It Looks Pretty’s over-exposed shots. Structures of abjection seem to seep into the editing process: while Walentowska attempted to divide up the raw footage into suitable and unsuitable fragments, the ‘unselected footage’ ‘very often [… came] back’ (Walentowska 2015, 94). As well as being over-exposed, the images of the film are frequently blurred, sometimes through the use of the hand-held camera, and at other points through aesthetic choice. In the very first image of the film, for example, the trees of the forest are foregrounded in sharp focus, while the three men in the background appear as indistinct blurs. Throughout this scene, the focus visibly and continually shifts, such that human outlines are given clarity before blurring again, as though a pull towards formlessness (as literally construed) is infecting this scene. In explaining the film’s ‘flawed’ shots, Majmurek (2015, 100) describes how, frequently, ‘the camera is located in a place from which it can see only a fragment of the space where the action is set, while the rest of the space remains outside the frame’. Such compositions can be highly disorientating. In the film’s second scene, for example, we watch a car that seems to be gliding backwards along a road for several seconds, before it is revealed that it is being transported on a flat-bed truck. At several points throughout the film, the villagers’ faces, traditionally sites of human expression, meaning and ethical relations, are blurred, turned away from us or blocked by human limbs and objects that fill the frame at awkward angles. Heads are sometimes entirely cut off by the frame. When Paweł returns at the end of the film, it is difficult to be entirely sure of his identity, for we can barely make out his face. Such shots perform a denigration of vision that lead us further away from meaning, causation and coherence and into ambiguity and uncertainty. It is not just the ‘narrative web’ that is ‘thin’, nor only the film itself that is threadbare: the interpretive nets of meaning that we are accustomed to casting onto films may also fray across It Looks Pretty’s sharp scraps of indeterminate images.

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From Abjection to Informe In Kristeva’s writing, the mother is the primary figure in processes of abjection. The abject confronts us ‘with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity’; the subject pursues ‘a reluctant struggle against what, having being the mother, will turn into an abject’ (Kristeva 1982, 13). It is unclear what exactly is afflicting Paweł’s mother in It Looks Pretty. In the poem, Sasnal writes that she has ‘lost her mind’ and ‘can’t remember words’ (Sasnal 2015, 89). She never speaks, she wanders away from the home, and urinates directly on the floor. The yellowed stains on her nightdress suggest earlier moments of unlicensed release. As Elsaesser (2018, 135) explains, the mother’s ‘body and its secretions are especially liable to abjection’, and this particular moment of secretion seems to be the final straw for Paweł. He forces his struggling mother into a car and drives her away. Sasnal’s poem makes clear that Paweł acts not just in disgust, but also in greed: ‘The reek of the Mother in the whole house./And he wants to have the whole house for himself-/without the Mother and her reek’ (Sasnal 2015, 89). In the abject heterocosm of It Looks Pretty, however, nothing is ever entirely expelled. Soon after Paweł himself disappears, the Mother re-­ appears in a scene that is stylistically quite different from the rest of the film, as though it were a non-diegetic insert. First, we watch as the Girl scrubs Paweł’s house, attempting to remove all traces of the abject Mother (Sasnal’s poem: ‘The Girl finds the old woman disgusting/she imagines that the reek will get to her/it will stay in her hair, under the nails, in the clothes […] She imagines carrying/arranging putting in order/throwing away sniffing washing ventilating scrubbing’) (Sasnal 2015, 89–90). She lies down on the bed in the dim light. Barely audible at first, but rapidly growing in volume, we start to hear a series of rhythmic shouts, before the scene cuts to show the Mother standing inside the house in front of the window; the space behind her is a black void. The camera slowly pulls back from her, though the shouts become louder the further away we move. A musical undertone is also introduced into the scene, the film’s only obvious example of non-diegetic sound. This undertone is a long, drawn-out electronic note with no variation, which sounds uncannily like one long shout. It also becomes gradually louder, until the tone and the Mother’s shouts are overlapping. This noise, arguably, emerges from the horror of the Mother’s abjection; as Chare (2011, 47) writes, screaming can be seen as excremental, ‘a

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kind of shitting out’, the continuation in noise of the Mother’s earlier gesture of urinating on the floor. Abjection is linked with noise in displaying the ‘experience of an unsound self, the experience of losing experience, of losing the shape that is an experience, of almost attaining the non-experience of unbecoming’ (Chare 2011, 52). The Mother’s ‘unbecoming’ (she has ‘lost her mind’) seems to have been in process for some time before we see her removal. Expelled as a maternal abject, she is also partially expelled by the film, reappearing only briefly in a spatially and temporally disorientating supplement. Can these shouts be made to signify in an allegorical system of meaning, however deferred? It is possible, of course. The Mother’s shouts are almost entirely affectless and unlinked from subjective emotional expression, as though she is ventriloquising the horror of abjection and violence which belongs not just to her, but to history and to the community. Her shouts may emerge immediately from her mouth, but they also emanate from the window of the house in which the cycle of greed is about to be reactivated in the looting and destruction of Paweł’s possessions, a cycle that has (partially) ingested its previous Jewish victims. The horror of the past is set loose through sound, and becomes a ‘noisy embodiment’ of it (Chare 2011, 66). Perhaps only these shouts body forth the repressed historical atrocity that cannot be ‘phrased in the accepted idioms’ (Lyotard 1988, 56–57). Certainly no horror, remorse or sense of responsibility is ever expressed by any of the film’s characters through language. Yet none of these interpretations capture the force of the noise, its protraction through duration. It is the task of interpretation to, as Chare puts it, ‘make sense (out) of noise’, to ‘catch’ noise within language (2011, 47). Noise, however, is the ‘hole’ through which something always escapes interpretation (Chare 2011, 47). There is something in the Mother’s shouts that escapes meaning altogether; they draw us away from allegory and towards the pulsation of the informe. As opposed to a forward-­moving temporality that suggests a narrative arc and directs us toward a meaningful ending, pulsation ‘involves an endless beat that punctures the disembodied self-closure of pure visuality and incites an irruption of the carnal’ (Krauss and Bois 1997, 32). Pulsation moves us away from abstract meaning; it is not a symbolisable theme or stable motif, instead, it ‘annuls metaphor’ (1997, 32). Pulsation is, for Krauss and Bois (1997, 18), ‘performative, like obscene words, the violence of which derives less from semantics than from the very act of their delivery.’ The Mother’s shouts are also performative: they void the body, language and meaning through

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noise. They pulsate with an energy that spills over the frames themselves (from the Girl on the bed to the Mother in the house); in their aural porousness, the frames momentarily lose their contours, becoming de-formed.

Rotten Sun: Witness and Memory After all the greed, betrayal, hatred and violence described in Sasnal’s poem, it ends with the words ‘the sun witnesses everything’ (Sasnal 2015, 91). There are echoes here of the posthuman approach to material witnessing. In Chap. 2, I noted how a number of scholars have rejected the idea that the environment consists simply of inert matter, arguing that organic and other non-human material can index the scale and nature of the atrocities that they have ‘witnessed’. More prosaically, the idea of the sun as a witness evokes associations with impartiality and omniscience, but also with muteness (the sun cannot testify). Turning to Bataille, however, we find that while the noon sun may be taken as a symbol for ‘spiritual elevation’, it is also ‘the most abstract object, since it is impossible to look at it fixedly at that time of day’ (Bataille 1985, 57). If one ‘obstinately focuses on it, a certain madness is implied’, and the production of light now appears as ‘refuse or combustion’, as ‘horror’ (1985, 57). Bataille terms this the ‘rotten sun’, ‘that which most ruptures the highest elevation’ and which ‘has a share in the elaboration or decomposition of forms’ (1985, 58). This is the sun of murder and mutilation.19 Far from the sun of impartial witness, it is this ‘rotten sun’, I want to suggest, which hangs over the village of It Looks Pretty, debasing some of the conventional associations with the term ‘witness’, such as a responsibility towards remembering the past and testifying on behalf of injustice. Under It Looks Pretty’s rotten sun, there are only degradations of remembrance and oppositions to commemorative drives, indexing the way in which the informe ‘bring[s] things down in the world’ (Bataille 1985, 31). Consider, again, how the only reference to wartime atrocities is conveyed by Posłaniec. He delivers the few words of the story through mouthfuls of food and in between chews and grunts. While the camera reframes a few times in the scene, for its entirety the frame is dominated by the man’s bare arm, which appears immense in the foreground (Fig. 6.2). We can barely make out his face in profile, in a departure from the countless fiction and documentary films in which witness testimony or narratives of atrocity are delivered by subjects facing the camera (as in, for

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Fig. 6.2  It Looks Pretty: narrating atrocity through mouthfuls of food

example, Łoziński’s 1992 film Birthplace).20 This arm is ‘physiognomy’s obverse’, ‘flesh without sense’, to use Trotter’s words (2000, 218).21 It is as though the obtuse matter of flesh in the frame and food in the mouth were obstructing or displacing memory, deforming it, stripping it of its significance. Anxieties around Holocaust memory—about convenient forgetting or the loss of access to a survivor’s story—have frequently been figured in film through the trope of dementia (Vice 2018). Thinking allegorically, it is tempting to see the Mother in this light; if she has ‘lost her mind’ as the poem and her actions in the film suggest, it is likely that she has also lost her memory, and perhaps could be seen to function as an emblem for the village as a whole. However, it seems clear from Posłaniec’s horrific ‘anecdote’ that the village has not lost its collective memory, has not, as it were, expelled the memory of the past in an amnesiac process. The structure of the ‘open secret’, LaCapra (2009, 177–178) has argued, rather involves ‘an active or performative process whereby compassion or empathy with the other is blocked’.22 The village displays no interest in memorialising or commemorating the deaths of those who have been rendered ‘other’. The awareness of past atrocities is also seemingly irrelevant to the continuation of similar actions in the present. There is no ‘Never Again’ here. In his work on the role of objects in Holocaust memory, Kistner (2013, 121) has described how ‘contemporary form[s] of commemorative

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culture’ often dedicate themselves to the ‘conservation, valorization and aesthetic presentation of select objects’, such as those objects found at former concentration camps, or objects previously owned by Jewish families, which are exempted from ‘unkindly disposal’. The ‘obverse’ of this process, he writes, is the ‘degradation to waste’, where ‘objects are blithely left to rot’ (Kistner 2013, 121). It Looks Pretty’s village is a veritable scrapheap; the one object that is identified as ‘from the war’, the soup ladle, demands further attention, however. The ladle is neither ‘exempted’ from use as a commemorative object, nor left to rot. One could thus add a further category to Kistner’s list: objects that are fetishised through acts of looting (to draw on an argument put forward by Shallcross 2011, 4), repurposed and placed once again into circulation.23 In the process of looting, the accretions of significance and layers of memory invested by previous owners are progressively stripped away, such that the objects are no longer able to ‘define who one is in a historical sense’ (Annette Weiner cited by Kistner 2013, 126). It seems important for this destabilisation of identity that viewers barely even see the soup ladle; it is almost entirely displaced from our vision, a deformed blur at the edge of the image. The rotten sun of It Looks Pretty exerts its influence over the film’s frames, it seems, as much as it does over the village’s inhabitants. The noon sun is impossible to look at directly: it blinds, it crazes, it ruptures. Previously, I pointed to certain compositions in Ida, in which over-­ exposure or blank sections of light create blind spots in the frame. Light, rather than illuminating or enlightening, can act as a void, a ‘vacant centre, stag[ing] precisely nothing’ (Brinkema 2014, 110). At several points in It Looks Pretty, too, light seems to burn the centre of the frame as ‘refuse or combustion’ (Bataille 1985, 57), mimicking the expenditure of the rotten sun. In one exterior shot, angled upwards through the trees, the camera stares directly towards the sun, which appears as a blurred, yellow-edged void of white light (Fig. 6.3). This shot echoes an image of Paweł’s dark living room at night, where the television set emits flickering, blank white light in which we can see nothing: this is light as waste (Fig.  6.4). In images of the bonfire that burns Paweł’s remaining possessions, the light of the fire seems to swallow up everything around it, dissolving all forms and outlines at its edges, burning white at its centre. The rotten sun warps and deforms the image even when one is not staring directly into it; its heat creates visual distortions in the image. In many of the film’s frames, the refractions of light caused by heat are apparent in wavy lines on the horizon, such that objects lose their distinct outlines.

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Figs. 6.3 and 6.4  Light blistering through It Looks Pretty’s frames

Colours blur into one another in ‘fogs’ of indistinction, to borrow Ffrench’s description of formlessness (2017, 168). For Ffrench, the ‘site where colour washes out or mixes into a kind of mud is akin to Bataillean expenditure, a site of loss of meaning, of formlessness’ (Ffrench 2017, 168). Aptly, these heat waves in It Looks Pretty appear most prominently immediately after the murder of Paweł, which takes place in the full light

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of the rotten sun. From the passenger seat of the car, the Girl stabs Paweł in the torso as he drives. The next image is a long-shot of the road; the Girl gets out of the car and begins to walk calmly towards us. The camera is positioned low to the ground, the better to capture how the heat emanating from the road warps the line of the horizon into unstable wavering arcs.

Waste: A System In the abject heterocosm of the village, structures of violence and affective networks of hatred and greed form a residue that cannot be expelled. I want now to link these structures more closely to the actual objects within the film: the scrap, the waste, the litter, the mess. In Cooking with Mud, Trotter makes a distinction between waste-matter, which has been expelled by a system or organism that no longer requires it (and thus still bears the imprint of human agency and purpose) and mess, which confounds systems, symbolism and meaning (Trotter 2000, 20–21). Waste, unlike mess, ‘can often be recycled, or put to alternative uses […] Waste remains forever potentially in circulation because circulation is its defining quality’ (2000, 20). I will come back to mess in due course, but want to remain now with waste. Paweł and his neighbours seem to have one major occupation: collecting scrap matter for further sale. They are involved heavily in a continual process of recycling, where, it seems at first glance, everything can be useful. If scrap cannot be sold, it can be used to make a pig trough or rabbit hutches, like those in Paweł’s yard. In commenting on the village of Zielona where the film was made, Wilhelm Sasnal noted how ‘everything is made maximum use of, reprocessed’ (Ruszczyk 2012). He describes, further, how he observed a man who had brought back some bricks from a destroyed house in a neighbouring village, and used them to build a henhouse. ‘Then everything came together for us’, Sasnal stated, ‘we associated it with Gross’ (Ruszczyk 2012). Sasnal’s words help to make explicit the connections between material goods and violence, between greed and murder, between the salvaging of scrap and the recycling of structures of behaviour. The link with Gross’s work is most evident in It Looks Pretty’s scenes of looting. The day after Paweł’s house is stripped, piles of tangled­up sheets, clothing and furniture must be sorted and repurposed. At the Posłaniec household, a pilfered sheepskin airs on a fence, and greying curtains spin in a washing machine for several seconds of screen time (the

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machinic circulation of matter becoming an apt figure for the recycling at work). Once again, Sasnal’s poem is more explicit about linking this present moment of looting to past crimes. Once Paweł and his mother disappear, The house is waiting. Deaf and blind. It’s alone. People have pitchforks stones and knives It’s been this way for years They come because the house is deaf and blind and alone Just to snatch something. And there are few things to share. They want a lot but don’t have anything It’s been this way for years. (Sasnal 2015, 91)

The structures of productive recycling have their limits, however; the villagers seem unable to keep up with processing the sheer amount of matter, whether scrap or loot. Not everything can be reprocessed in this abject heterocosm. The film’s mise-en-scene is littered with broken, rusted objects that have clearly reached the end of their use-value. The men work busily in the yard to strip cars, yet scattered old tires and rusted car parts, overgrown with grass, belie the impression of all-encompassing productivity (Fig. 6.5). The wreckage strewn across the landscape again brings to

Fig. 6.5  The rural environment as scrapheap in It Looks Pretty

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mind Godard’s Weekend which, for Silverman, also plays out under the sign of abjection and ‘anal capitalism’. Weekend, she argues, maps the transformation of treasured objects into ‘worthless junk’ (Silverman and Farocki 1998, 89). In late capitalism, commodity value is quickly diminished and substitutes for these commodities are just as quickly found. ‘The moment of enjoyment of each new commodity becomes briefer and briefer’, Silverman and Farocki write, ‘so that it passes for this reason as well much more quickly into the category of “shit”’ (1998, 90). Bataille, too, envisioned an entropic ‘corollary of overproduction: namely, the noncompactible accumulation of unassimilable waste’ (Krauss and Bois 1997, 224). It Looks Pretty’s village appears as a kind of wrecking yard of capitalist modernity accumulating the detritus of modern life, a scrapheap for bits left over from the lives lived better elsewhere. Some of this junk can be repurposed, and thus reinserted into a system of value, but much of it overflows such systems, leaving the villagers to wallow in excremental remainders. This has implications for human, as well as object, shelf-life: ‘where economic value reigns supreme, the human being cannot hold its own against the humblest object’ (Silverman and Farocki 1998, 91). The film encourages us to make connections between the waste matter and the people who inhabit this filmic junkyard. Mirek, for example, jokes to

Fig. 6.6  It Looks Pretty: Mirek’s father becoming-scrap

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Paweł that when his father is no longer able to work, he too will be sent for scrap. Later, we see him lying amongst, and blending in with, the detritus in the yard, with his face turned away from the camera: this is the human becoming-scrap, which is also a process of becoming-abject (Fig. 6.6). As Elsaesser (2018, 135) writes, the abject marks ‘the narrow gap that separates the useful from the useless, signalling the point when humans are seen or treated as material objects.’ Paweł scraps his mother, and is in turn scrapped. In the past, the Jewish villagers ceased to have a use-value, indeed, their lives impeded an appropriation of their goods, which were of more value than human life. Much has been written on the conceptualisation of the human as a piece of waste (seen to be) fit only for discarding. Indeed, an early treatise on the abject by Bataille, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, was largely a socio-political reflection on the production of the working classes as ‘misérables’, as abject, excess and waste, as reduced to a bestial state, ‘overtaken by filth and decay’ (Georgelou 2014, 28). More recently, Zygmunt Bauman (2004, 5) has argued that ‘The production of “human waste”, or more correctly wasted humans (the “excessive” and “redundant”[…]) is an inevitable outcome of modernisation […] an inescapable side-effect of order-building (each order casts some parts of the extant population as “out of place”, “unfit”, or “undesirable”)’. It Looks Pretty, however, does not seem overly interested in a critique of such a system at a macro level (in relation to wider economic and political structures, for example). Rather than focus our attention on the workings of the state, It Looks Pretty is interested in a much more local ‘order-building’. The undesirables of It Looks Pretty’s past were the Jewish residents; in the contemporary absence of this most stereotyped ‘other’, the micro-system of the village has continued to turn relentlessly inwards, incessantly producing ‘others’ to be wasted.24

Mess: An Anti-system For Trotter, waste matter ‘is an effect which can be traced back to its cause. It bears the perceptible imprint of human agency, of human purpose, of system’ (2000, 20). Mess, on the other hand, can be seen as a kind of anti-system, signalling a ‘declassification of meaning and value’, which brings us to the limits of our ability and desire to ascribe significance to the world (2000, 326–327). The ‘poetics of mess’, Trotter argues, involves a degree of ‘formlessness’ (31), and as such draws us close to the writing of

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Bataille. Bataille, as Trotter points out, ‘assembles an inventory of those messes which most emphatically destroy illusion’ (2000, 326–327); most prominent is the smeared faecal matter on a man’s underwear in Salvador Dali’s 1929 painting The Lugubrious Game.25 The difference between waste (as system) and mess (as anti-system) is not always clear-cut; it may often be a question of ‘scale and point-of-view’ (Trotter 2000, 21). Matter in a landfill, for example, ‘can be understood as waste in relation to the system of which it is the consequence’, while ‘a piece of that matter drifting through an open window into proximity with a person becomes (or makes) a mess’ (Trotter 2000, 21). Where these categories overlap most strikingly is through litter, which tends to indicate carelessness rather than system, and which disturbs our vision of ‘pattern and purpose at work in the world’ (2000, 38). Litter or garbage indicate effects that have ‘strayed a long way from [their] cause’; these may inscribe human ‘presence’, but not ‘human meaning, not human value’ (2000, 43). It is, in part, in the process of waste becoming litter and mess that the denigration of meaning and value throughout It Looks Pretty is made visible. The scrap metal and pieces of junk in the yard may still be identifiable as waste-products of a system, but in their embedding into the landscape these scraps have become litter. They are so far removed from any purposeful role in the system that initially produced them as to render this system meaningless. Bricks and other building matter might be reused and recycled to build hen coops and rabbit hutches, but a vast stream of broken bricks and concrete has also spewed purposelessly onto Paweł’s lawn, remaining there as litter and mess. Window frames torn from Paweł’s house and dumped in a heap are waste, but the bonfire that engulfs them leaves only a mess of ash for the village children to rake through. It is, admittedly, tempting to insert all the different kinds of material refuse in It Looks Pretty into a system of allegorical meaning, as though the film’s decaying junk were a kind of degraded version of Benjamin’s ruin. A close reading of images of litter and mess instead reveals, not an erasure of interpretive drives and opportunities, but their continual deflation. One scene at the river provides a potent example of this: Mirek has just shouted at the teenagers on the opposite bank, who are shown retreating. There is a cut, then, to a gravelled road, framed by scrubby vegetation, in the centre of which lies a medium-sized, pale, perhaps plastic, but ultimately unidentifiable, piece of litter (Fig. 6.7). The frame holds on the refuse for several seconds, before cutting back to the men. Mirek is now falling asleep, and falling out of the frame, and Paweł gets up to walk into the

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Fig. 6.7  Unidentifiable trash in the heat of It Looks Pretty’s rotten sun

forest (and subsequently disappears). These two scraps of footage at the river are thus bundled in together with this image of litter. What, if anything, can be read here? Arguably, the trash connects together processes of othering and expulsion: the confrontation with the teenagers, Paweł’s imminent removal from the community (and he, too, will be left on a hot road, discarded like a piece of trash), and even, reaching further back, the wartime violence at the river. The rubbish marks the ‘non-site’ of Jewish suffering and death, creating an echo between excluded people and unwanted matter (Sendyka 2017, 100; see Chap. 2). What such readings might miss, however, is the importance of the film’s temporal unfolding. On the one hand, the shot of the litter marks a temporal ellipsis. Between the two moments at the river, the sun has gone down; an unidentifiable amount of time has passed. There is a certain economy in this, in that much of the time between the two river scenes has been ‘thrown out’. On the other hand, the shot of the litter itself seems to usher in a different temporal mode, something apart from the actions at the river bank that take place on either side of the image. Discarded objects, as Viney (2014, 10) has argued, may have a specific temporality: ‘a state of material being that is marked by a temporal disorientation […] a time without a functional, and therefore a temporal, end.’ If objects have a ‘use-time’, ‘a finite stretch of time marked by the projected use and

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cessation of use’, then discarded objects mark the moment where ‘the narrative that drives and organizes use-time has lost its motivation or forward propulsion’ (Viney 2014, 9). With the shot of the litter, we find ourselves in a ‘redundant and decommissioned time that is cast-off and left over’ (2014, 10). The temporality of (non)use-value is relevant both for objects in the mise-en-scene and for our reading of them: if we think of an allegorical reading or interpretive drive as ‘useful’ and ‘motivated’, directing us towards the forward propulsion of meaning, then we may find that the shot of the litter is elongated beyond its ‘use-value’. The moment becomes emptied of purpose, of meaning. The drive or desire for meaning seems to collide with a counter-force that denies it, suggesting how easily discarded our tenuous interpretations might be. While distinctions between waste, mess and litter might be a matter of shifting perspectives, no one could mistake the Mother’s exemplary moment of mess-making, in urinating on the floor, for anything else.26 Urine can, of course, signify (marking territory, indicating the state of maternal abjection), but signification seems the ‘least compelling aspect’ of such messes, to appropriate Trotter’s words, which instead ‘explode the screen […] onto which meanings are customarily projected’ (2000, 64).27 The Mother’s urine is a disfiguring mess, voiding meaning and debasing signification. The Bataillean notion that ‘spittle is what the signature of the informe would look like, if the informe had a signature’ (Trotter 2000, 327) seems equally applicable to puddles and streams of urine on carpets and clothes. Messes tend to smell (the ‘reek of the Mother [is] in the whole house’, as Sasnal’s poem has it). After the Mother’s expulsion in the film, the Girl prompts Paweł to get rid of her maggot-infested bed as ‘it stinks of piss’. Theories of embodiment and the haptic in cinema have frequently suggested that the visual image can powerfully evoke the spectator’s sense of smell.28 Brinkema (2014, 144), however, has compellingly argued the opposite: the smell of something that we see in the visual image is ‘necessarily, absolutely, and irreducibly excluded from [cinema’s] sensual workings’. Rather than functioning as a trope, theme or metaphorical expression, the olfactory is ‘a force that designates a structural rend’ in the film (Brinkema 2014, 145).29 This rending force arguably also describes the operation of the informe, which continually deforms, rips and tears holes in the image, moving us further away from signification.30

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…But It Is Disgusting from Close Up The film’s title indicates a ‘may’ and a ‘but’: it (the countryside, the landscape, the village?) ‘may’ look pretty from a distance, ‘but’ what happens when we look at it from closer up? In her review of the film, Iwona Kurz (2012) provides a direct answer: close to, we see protagonists who are repulsive, dirty and evil. Likening the film, at first glance, to a kind of nature documentary, she catalogues the ‘scratching, smoking, eating, drinking, burping, dirt, pants hanging down, overhanging stomachs’ that appear in the film. All of this, she continues, is shown with a painterly attention to detail: ‘[the film] smears and grinds as you watch’ (Kurz 2012). The film’s bodily messes may evoke disgust in ways that, once again, interfere with our desires for meaning, drawing us instead towards repugnant matter: ‘it is in the disgust provoked by the ebbing of so much significance that materiality reclaims the object’ (Trotter 2000, 217). In her recent work on disgust, however, Brinkema (2014, 130) advocates against merely identifying disgusting objects—the vomit, excrement, urine, blood, corpses and rot that are generally brought up in this context—and thinking instead about disgust in relation to (cinematic) form. In Brinkema’s thinking, conflating disgust (as an affect) with its objects recuperates these  objects through their classification and makes them available to our understanding as objects of knowledge. In this familiarisation, the very ‘speed, velocity, and nauseous rush’ of disgust is lost (2014, 132). The turn of attention from the objects of disgust to its structure is redolent of the afore-mentioned repositioning of the notion of abjection. Indeed, Brinkema cites Kristeva as an influence on her thinking about disgust; both abjection and disgust draw us towards ‘the place where meaning collapses’, haunting ‘the borders of subjective constitution as the expelled’ (Brinkema 2014, 138). Brinkema (2014, 132) likens disgust to a ‘white hole’ (as opposed to the absorbing vacuum of the black hole) that ‘continually spits things out’. The events of It Looks Pretty take place precisely amongst such excretions. In the film, disgust and revulsion also have a structure, one that enacts an oscillation between closeness and distance. Every so often, the film will pause in its near-ethnographic focus on the people of the village and show us an unpeopled environment: a field with a clump of trees in the background (Fig. 6.8), or a landscape imbued with the redness of a setting sun. These framings briefly invoke the power and mastery of the viewer’s gaze over landscape. The natural environment seems framed for our view, arranged for the eye, and ‘in the process, the

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Fig. 6.8  It Looks Pretty’s rural landscape, pretty from a distance

observer and the observed [are] separated’, as Ivakhiv notes in relation to landscape painting (2013, 79). Landscape arranged in this way offers a sense that the framed world yields its meaning to our gaze, while removing visuality from its embeddedness in the other senses (Ivakhiv 2013, 80). It Looks Pretty oscillates between these processes of distancing and re-embedding. In these short breaks away from the village, the film turns away (revolts) from it, but it always re-turns and plunges back in again, enacting the pull between fascination and repulsion that both disgust and abjection inspire.31 If there is a structure of disgust in It Looks Pretty, there is also, significantly, a politics, which leads us back towards thinking about disgust’s ‘objects’. What does it mean for the villagers to be rendered ‘disgusting’, in their bodily emissions and scatological vocabulary (they constantly make reference to ‘disgusting’ bodily functions)? Plantinga (2009, 212) has argued that physical disgust can be used to create ‘moral and ideological antipathy’ towards characters and ‘promote their condemnation’. It Looks Pretty indeed seems to encourage the conflation of physical disgust with an aversion towards the villagers’ unethical behaviour. Within the film, disgust is channelled precisely in the way that Brinkema attempts to avoid in her focus on disgust’s structure. That is, the villagers are framed as disgusting ‘objects’, becoming thus readily identifiable, knowable and

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even familiar. One can, then, more easily turn away from them, separate oneself from them, and reject them as something (physically and morally disgusting and) ‘other’. Identifying disgust with its contents, ‘filling in its gut with objectal specificities’, reassures us that ‘the excluded can be known, perceived, bounded, and therefore limited’ (Brinkema 2014, 130). If the film suggests the ways in which the village’s Jewish residents were abjected and violently excluded, it also shows us the becoming-abject of those that previously excluded them, the Catholic ‘peasants’. Some of the horror of past Polish behaviour towards Jewish Poles can thus be placed firmly at their feet and more easily disavowed by much of the film’s audience. In Elsaesser’s (2018) account of the ‘abject subject’ in contemporary European cinema, the state of abjection carries the possibility of redemption and resistance to the overwhelming, exclusionary and dehumanising forces of the state. The viewer, he argues, is mostly on the side of the abject subject.32 In It Looks Pretty, this seems far from the case. On the one hand, of course, this is not surprising: the filmmakers are referencing the collective perpetration of past crimes against Jewish citizens, rather than primarily presenting the down and outs of late capitalism. At the same time, however, the Polish ‘peasant’ is depicted in a distinctly elitist manner. How else are we to interpret a statement like Wilhelm Sasnal’s concerning his observations about the people of Zielona (the prototypes for It Looks Pretty’s villagers) ‘liv[ing] close to the ground, in a primitive way’? As Kurz writes, then, while It Looks Pretty may tackle difficult questions relating to Polish violence, it does so in a way that reinforces clichés. Rather than showing that we can all be ‘lowlifes’, as the filmmakers suggested (Ruszczyk 2012), it encourages us to reject and abject the ‘disgusting’ villagers on screen.33 Having done so, we may be tempted to pay little attention to any excremental remainders that continue to smear visions of Polish collectivity.

Animality In a question and answer session following a screening of It Looks Pretty, Wilhelm Sasnal claimed that he wanted to show the ‘animality’ of the people of the village.34 This section of the chapter will consider some of the implications of such a statement, as well as the resonances emerging from the film’s references to, and depictions of, animal bodies. Far from the negative tonality of Sasnal’s statement, considering human-animal connections in fact encourages a reading that might be formulated in

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opposition to the politics of disgust, opening up a further perspective on the film. Genocide, torture and victimisation are ‘all-too-human practices’, yet, as LaCapra notes, when humans engage in such actions, they are often described as ‘bestial’ or ‘animalistic’ (2009, 156). LaCapra characterises this tendency as a ‘scapegoat mechanism whereby traits causing anxiety in humans are gathered up, expelled, and projected exclusively onto other animals’ (2009, 155). In relation to It Looks Pretty, this scapegoating can be seen as another way in which viewers might comfort themselves that the ‘animalistic’, ‘primitive’ villagers responsible for wartime atrocities are not ‘like us.’ At the same time, animal metaphors often cut across distinctions between perpetrator and victim, in a way that creates new fault lines: not between human and animal, but between predator and prey.35 In Sasnal’s poem, the Jewish people hiding in the forest are likened to creatures ‘burrow[ing] like animals’ (Sasnal 2015, 88). As I noted in Chap. 3, persecuted groups have often been associated with animals. In describing the organised ‘hunts’ for Jewish people hiding in rural spaces during the Holocaust (the so-called Judenjagd), recent Polish scholarship has highlighted the more literal ways in which animal terminology has been applied (see Grabowski 2013). Agamben’s concept of the state of exception is frequently evoked by scholars contemplating what it means to be stripped of one’s humanity in times of genocide, a question that seems intimately bound up with thinking about human–animal distinctions (see Agamben 2002). In Agamben’s writing, the concentration camps suspended and created an ‘outside’ to the law, reducing the body to bare life. This dispossession of legal status, as Chare (2011, 127) writes, implies a dispossession of language, and the ‘possession of language […] is a part of what makes man [sic] human rather than animal.’36 In It Looks Pretty we are not, of course, dealing with the concentration camps, but the film does seem to stage a space beyond the law where the human being (including the Jewish villagers in the past, and Paweł in the present) can be killed with impunity. Previously in this chapter I have linked the processes of victimisation to the discourse of waste; for LaCapra, animality, waste and bare life are all interconnected notions. In anti-Semitic discourse, Jewish people are associated not only with particular kinds of non-human animals, but also with ‘a rag, a piece of refuse, excrement, or, in Agamben’s sense, mere life’ (LaCapra 2009, 159).37 This theoretical context is significant when it comes to considering how references to animals are made in It Looks Pretty. In the film’s

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opening scene, Paweł, Mirek and his father are shown setting and checking animal snares; the camera lingers on nooses made from wire and sharp-­ toothed traps (see Fig. 2.1). Read in conjunction with Sasnal’s poem, the laying of animal traps becomes a continuation or replaying of past attempts to flush out hiding Jewish villagers. From this first scene onwards, entrapment operates throughout the film. We can see it in the images of flypaper, heavy with dead insects, that hang in Paweł’s house. It is evident in the moment when the Mother is recaptured after getting loose, like a runaway animal, and must be locked up again, and in the final scene of Paweł being stabbed in his car, which becomes its own metallic ‘trap’. One could read the references to animal entrapment as part of an allegorical schema in which animality substitutes for humanity. As Pick (2011, 136) notes, however, the tendency to elevate human figures in hierarchical allegorical schemas gives the comforting impression of history as a ‘coherent if not teleological narrative at the centre of which operate privileged human subjects’. Such optimism seems out of place in a film such as It Looks Pretty, which, I have argued, continually destabilises history, coherence and narrative. Does the film then offer other ways of thinking about animal bodies and animal-human connections? Two scenes in particular, both involving the deaths of dogs, might help us to answer this question. In the first, Posłańcowa comes to Paweł’s house soon after his disappearance. She winds his dog’s chain tight so that it cannot move freely, and kicks its water bowl out of the way. In the second, shortly before Paweł’s return, the Girl mixes poison into dog food and feeds some of it to two dogs, including her own. Something in these scenes refuses to be abstracted into an anthropocentric allegorical schema. The film pays close attention to the meticulousness of the women in carrying out these killings, lingering on the actions which take up the entirety of the scenes in which they play out. The killings also seem barely connected to any moments before and after (apart from when the film shows us the dead dogs later on). The scenes elongate the sheer, senseless cruelty of these acts. In comparison, Paweł’s murder is extremely quick: just one sharp stab of a knife, and the scene cuts. Rather than only or necessarily ‘stand in’ for human experience, the dogs embody what Pick has called ‘creaturely suffering’ (2011, 190). In this recalibrated reading of cinematic animals, human–animal hierarchies are levelled, and we can consider ‘the shared physicality of [both] human and animal life’ (Pick 2011, 136). Pick revises Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ in order to recognise that ‘all life is bare in the sense of being susceptible to the

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interventions of power’ (2011, 15). If we consider It Looks Pretty’s animals against the grain of Sasnal’s comments, and move away from the tendency of allegory to deny animal presence beyond the role of substituting for human concerns, we can better see how all bodies are vulnerable to the continued mechanisms of violence.

Allegory: Final Approach This chapter began with a discussion of allegorical frameworks and, in considering It Looks Pretty’s animal bodies, we have returned to the question of allegory at its close. The structure of the chapter thus mirrors the movements of the film towards and away from the allegorical, which It Looks Pretty enacts in a continual process. Intermittently and in between, a different vision of meaning and signification has emerged, one in which the film’s mise-en-scene is not just an allegorically resonant rubbish dump (where, for example, chains of signification extend between scrap matter and abject humanity) but a waste heap of allegory. The constituent parts of potential allegorical readings might be present, but are fundamentally corroded. The film gives us a vision of an allegory ‘found on a scrapheap’, where it has broken apart, the pieces have rotted, the edges have frayed, and it is not possible to put it back together again without the voids and gaps in its fragile texture destabilising the coherence of the remainder. We seem to be left, in other words, amongst the ‘inevitable waste of the meaning system, the stuff that is no longer recyclable by the great processes of assimilation’, in a realm ravaged by the informe (Krauss and Bois 1997, 245). The question of meaning and its limits, a key element driving the enquiries in this book in general, has emerged in different ways across this chapter’s theoretical approaches, from allegory’s deferrals and slippages, abjection’s collapse, informe’s degradation, mess’s disfiguration and the structural rend of the olfactory. In It Looks Pretty, the past seems to constitute a kind of unrepresented void, yet the film powerfully suggests its continuing presence by framing an abject heterocosm in which nothing is expelled. The past continues, or lives on, to borrow from Derrida (1994, xx) in the structures of othering and violence that are continually recycled, in much the same way as possessions and objects are passed from hand to hand. The film suggests a continual denigration of meaning and value, which infects the villagers’ ability or desire to process (let alone commemorate) past atrocities and engage ethically with each other in the present. Partly through mobilising

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the powerful forces of disgust, the film also problematically encourages viewers to enact their own process of abjection in rejecting these ‘primitive’ villagers as not like us. This strategy runs the risk of allowing the question of Polish wartime actions, complicity and responsibility to be projected onto something that can be pushed away. Readers of Kristeva will know that the process of abjection can never be complete. ‘From its place of banishment’, she writes, ‘the abject does not cease challenging its master’ (Kristeva 1982, 2). Yet, from the unwanted images and unwanted knowledge with which this book began, It Looks Pretty compels us to acknowledge that some images of Polish violence might have become more convenient and less unwanted than others.

Notes 1. See also my brief discussion of Wilhelm Sasnal’s painting Las in Chap. 2. 2. In her review of the film, Iwona Kurz (2012) has also considered that it has the potential to act ‘metaphorically’, wherein the past is invoked through the contemporary ‘mechanisms’ of collective exclusion and aggression. 3. Stoekl (1985, xiv) has pointed out that Bataille does not do away with allegory altogether: ‘the process of signification and reference associated with allegory continues, but leads to the terminal subversion of the psuedostable references that had made allegory and its hierarchies seem possible’. The allegorical system in which, for example, the head of the human body, God, and the King are linked together is not just replaced in Bataille’s writing with the elevation of the ‘low’—with excrement, the rotten sun, the big toe—instead, this fall is ‘a kind of incessant or repetitious process.’ For Stoekl, ultimately, everything in Bataille’s writing is unstable—including his own terminology, which shifts and changes its meaning. 4. The foundation of their guide to the informe is Bataille’s short 1929 text ‘Formless’, part of the incomplete and subversive ‘critical dictionary’ published in the journal Documents. ‘A dictionary begins’, writes Bataille, ‘when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks’ (1985, 31). Thus ‘formless’ as a term does not have a given meaning, but instead ‘brings things down’ in a world that generally requires ‘that each thing has its form’. The formless ‘gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm’ (31). ‘Affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit’ (Bataille 1985, 31). 5. See, for example, Foster et al. (1994) for a key debate on this issue, which ends without resolution. ‘It seems to me we have come full circle, that is,

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into complete contradiction’, Foster states, in what I imagine is some despair, towards the debate’s close (20) [or. it]. See also Jay (1994), especially pp. 243–245; Foster (1996), especially pp. 114–120. 6. Elsaesser (2018, 144) provides a useful outline of how abjection has generally been utilised in film studies. 7. The poem is reprinted in Majmurek and Ronduda (2015, 88–91) where the author is credited as Anna Sasnal. 8. The term ‘post-Jewish’ (poz˙ydowskie) is frequently used in Polish discourse to describe the property and goods of Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust. While Nazi Germany undoubtedly benefitted most from the systematic plunder of material assets from Holocaust victims, Poles (from all socio-economic backgrounds) also gained from this ‘redistribution’ of wealth (see Grabowski and Libionka 2014 for an extensive account of these processes). As Forecki (2015, 75) has argued, the term ‘post-Jewish’ is often deployed as a ‘neutral’ descriptor that conceals the extent of these material appropriations within Poland and their accompanying acts of violence, anti-­Semitism and the dehumanisation of Jewish victims. 9. Chare is here discussing the four photographs taken from within Auschwitz while it was operating as a concentration and death camp, the same photographs analysed by Didi-Huberman (2008; see Chap. 1). Chare places the photographs in dialogue with Adorno’s 1966 essay ‘Commitment’ in Negative Dialectics (2007). 10. Majmurek, for example, has argued that the film is not allegorical, stating that ‘the visual language of the film (affective, veristic and anti-realistic at the same time) develops entirely beyond such figures as metaphor or allegory’ (2015, 104). 11. For Tokarska-Bakir (2015, 79), the issue of the ‘open secret’ goes beyond the binary of hiding and revealing. It involves the willing participation of those who keep the secret, and is an active, rather than passive, stance. 12. Such cases have been outlined by a number of scholars, including Gross (2006). 13. This is a reference to a chapter entitled ‘The Unwelcoming of Jewish Survivors’ in Gross’s 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation. 14. Langford is using the word ‘assemblage’ here in reference to Deleuze and Guattari. 15. Indeed, one of Kristeva’s examples of abjection relates to the Holocaust, and specifically to the way in which the heap of  children’s shoes at Auschwitz reminds her of heaps of dolls under a Christmas tree. ‘The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things’ (Kristeva 1982, 4). 16. My translations.

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17. For Kurz (2012), it is partly this lack of motivation behind the collective actions of the people that renders the film a largely failed exploration of mass mentality. 18. This impression is illusory: the film was very carefully put together, as Walentowska (2015, 92–94) makes clear. 19. In this context, it is interesting to make note of a recent film by the Sasnals, a loose adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger entitled The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me/Słońce, To Słońce Mnie Oślepiło (Poland/Switzerland, 2016), which also explores the construction of ‘otherness’ in contemporary Poland. In this film the protagonist murders an African man, claiming in court that he was ‘blinded by the sun’. For his discussion of the ‘blinding rays of the sun’ in relation to mutilation and sacrifice, see also Bataille’s 1930 essay ‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent van Gogh’ (1985, 61–72). 20. It Looks Pretty tends to deny or block face-to-face ethical encounters between characters, and between characters and viewer. 21. Trotter is referring to the bodies in Paul Cézanne’s 1868 painting The Murder. 22. LaCapra is here discussing animal slaughter, in dialogue with Holocaust history. 23. This repurposing has not been uncommon in Poland. Recall Baksik’s photographs of reused gravestones from Jewish cemeteries (2012) (discussed in Chap. 2) and Aftermath’s (Pasikowski 2012)  engagement with this same issue (discussed in Chap. 4). 24. For connections between human trash and waste in more specifically cinematic contexts, see also Harrow (2013) and Elsaesser (2018). 25. See Bataille, ‘The “Lugubrious Game”’ (1985, 24–30). 26. Urine is a product of the system of bodily wastes, but urine on a carpet and soaking a nightdress is mess, or ‘matter out of place’, to use the phrase popularised by Mary Douglas (2000, 36). The phrase is a citation from William James’s 1901–1902 text, The Varieties of Religious Experience. The entire passage seems resonant for my thinking about It Looks Pretty. James writes: ‘Here we have the interesting notion … of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any system which those elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident—so much “dirt” as it were, and matter out of place’ (Douglas 2000, 165). 27. Trotter is writing here about the gobs of spit expelled in various literary texts. 28. See, for example, Marks (2000). 29. Brinkema is discussing the smell of vomit in Wild at Heart (David Lynch, USA, 1990).

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30. Brinkema, however, remains unconvinced by Bataille’s writing on disgust; in her view, Bataille simply inverts hierarchies in his embrace of disgust, and is thus unable to interrogate the structure of disgust as an affect (2014, 123). 31. Carolyn Korsmeyer (2011, 3) calls this the ‘paradoxical magnetism’ of disgust; see Hamblin (2014) for further discussion of the structure of disgust in relation to political cinema. 32. See Elsaesser’s argument on pp. 200–206. 33. ‘We showed that any one of us can be a lowlife’, Wilhelm Sasnal stated (Ruszczyk 2012). 34. This session took place in the Centrum Sztuki Mościce in 2012 and is available on youtube as ‘Z Daleka Widok Jest Piękny Anka i Wilhelm Sasnalowie w Centrum Sztuki Mościce’:  https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=s3WUjTKFBXI. 35. Boria Sax (2000) has extensively catalogued the ways in which animal metaphors were used in and by Nazi Germany to refer to both the occupying German forces (who styled themselves as ‘Aryan’ wolves or pure-bred dogs) and the Jewish population (who in Nazi discourse were considered to be akin to vermin or mongrel dogs). The Nazi perspective was centered less on the human/animal distinction, he argues, than on the difference between ‘victor and vanquished, between master and slave […] predator and prey’ (Sax 2000, 23). No one, to my knowledge, has conducted a similarly in-­depth study of animal metaphors in relation to the Polish-Jewish relationship, but the focus on predator and prey seems particularly relevant for the context of It Looks Pretty. 36. For discussion of how Agamben’s work on the animal relates to his writing on the Holocaust, the state of exception, and bare life, see Benjamin (2010, 113–129) and Pick (2011, 23–51). 37. See Harrow for explicit connections between ‘bare life’, trash, forgotten histories, and ‘people who do not count’ (2013, 4) in the context of African cinema. See Tokarska-Bakir (2015) for further discussion of Agamben and LaCapra at the conjunction of animal studies and trauma theory.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2007. Negative Dialectics. London and New  York: Continuum. Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Aleksiun, Natalia. 2017. Intimate Violence: Jewish Testimonies on Victims and Perpetrators in Eastern Galicia. Holocaust Studies 23 (1–2): 17–33. Arnold, Agnieszka. 1999. …Where is My Older Son Cain? Poland.

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Baksik, Łukasz. 2012. Matzevot for Everyday Use. Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne. Bataille, Georges. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Trans. A. Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J. Osborne. London and New York: Verso. Benjamin, Andrew. 2010. Of Jews and Animals. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brinkema, Eugenie. 2014. The Forms of the Affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Chare, Nicholas. 2011. Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. New York and London: Routledge. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2008. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 2000. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2018. European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment. London and Oxford: Bloomsbury. Engelking, Barbara. 2011. Jest Taki Piękny Słoneczny Dzień…: Losy Żydów Szukaja ̨cych Ratunku na Wsi Polskiej 1942–1945. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagłada ̨ Żydów. Ffrench, Patrick. 2017. Memories of the Unlived Body: Jean-Louis Schefer, Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze. Film-Philosophy 12 (2): 161–187. Forecki, Piotr. 2015. “Mienie poz˙ydowskie” jako figura Polskiego dyskursu publicznego [“Post-Jewish Property” as a Figure of Polish Public Discourse]. Środkowoeuropejskie Studia Polityczne 4: 75–90. Foster, Hal. 1996. Obscene, Abject, Traumatic. October 78: 107–124. Foster, Hal, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Helen Molesworth. 1994. The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the “Informe” and the Abject. October 67: 3–21. Georgelou, Konstantina. 2014. Abjection and Informe. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 19 (1): 25–32. Gitelman, Zvi. 2003. Collective Memory and Contemporary Polish-Jewish Relations. In Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D.  Zimmerman, 271–290. New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Godard, Jean-Luc. 1967. Weekend. France. Grabowski, Jan. 2013. Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-­ Occupied Poland. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Grabowski, Jan, and Dariusz Libionka. 2014. Klucze i kasa. O mieniu żydowskim w Polsce pod okupacja ̨ niemiecka ̨ i we wczesnych latach powojennych 1939–1950. Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagłada ̨ Żydów.

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Gross, Jan T. 2003. Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941. London: Arrow Books. ———. 2006. Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation. New York: Random House. Hamblin, Sarah. 2014. A Cinema of Revolt: Black Wave Revolution and Dušan Makavejev’s Politics of Disgust. Cinema Journal 53 (4): 28–52. Harrow, Kenneth W. 2013. Trash: African Cinema from Below. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. 2013. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Jay, Martin. 1994. Abjection Overruled. Salmagundi 103: 235–251. Kistner, Ulrike. 2013. What Remains—Genocide and Things. In Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony, ed. Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams, 104–127. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kolski, Jan Jakub. 1990. Burial of a Potato/Pogrzeb Kartofla. Poland. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2011. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Krauss, Rosalind, and Yve-Alain Bois. 1997. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Kurz, Iwona. 2012. Ani z bliska, ani z daleka. Klisze i powidoki. Dwutygodnik, 76. Accessed 29 April 2020. https://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/3205-aniz-bliska-ani-z-daleka-klisze-i-powidoki.html. LaCapra, Dominick. 2009. History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Langford, Michelle. 2006. Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter. Bristol and Portland: Intellect. ———. 2007. Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman in Marziyeh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman. Camera Obscura 64 (22): 1–40. Listoe, Daniel. 2006. Seeing Nothing: Allegory and the Holocaust’s Absent Dead. SubStance 110 (35): 51–70. Łoziński, Paweł. 1992. Birthplace/Miejsce Urodzenia. Poland. Lynch, David. 1990. Wild at Heart. USA. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Majmurek, Jakub. 2015. The Realism of Intensity. In Polish Cine Art, or the Cinematographic Turn in Polish Contemporary Art, ed. Jakub Majmurek and Łukasz Ronduda, 98–111. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art Political Critiques Publishing House. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Durham: Duke University Press. Michlic, Joanna B. 2006. Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

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Pakier, Małgorzata. 2013. The Construction of European Holocaust Memory: German and Polish Cinema after 1989. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Pasikowski, Władysław. 2012. Pokłosie/Aftermath. Poland/Russia/Netherlands. Pawlikowski, Paweł. 2013. Ida. Poland/Denmark/France/UK. Pick, Anat. 2011. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Plantinga, Carl. 2009. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Oakland: University of California Press. Ruszczyk, Joanna. 2012. Sasnal i Sasnal: kaz˙dy moz˙e być kanalia ̨. Newsweek, 7 February. Accessed 27 April 2020. https://www.newsweek. pl/z-daleka-widok-jest-piekny-kazdy-moze-byc-kanalia-mowi-sasnal/7vh6lcs. Sasnal, Anna. 2015. It Looks Pretty From A Distance. In Polish Cine Art, or the Cinematographic Turn in Polish Contemporary Art, ed. Jakub Majmurek and Łukasz Ronduda, 88–91. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art Political Critiques Publishing House. Sasnal, Wilhelm, and Anka Sasnal. 2011. Z Daleka Widok Jest Piękny/It Looks Pretty from a Distance. Poland. ———. 2016. The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me/Słońce, To Słońce Mnie Oślepiło. Poland/Switzerland. Sax, Boria. 2000. Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats and the Holocaust. London and New York: Continuum. Sendyka, Roma. 2017. Nie-miejsca pamięci i ich nie-ludzkie pomniki. Teksty Drugie 2 (5): 86–108. Shallcross, Boz˙ena. 2011. The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Silverman, Kaja, and Harun Farocki. 1998. Speaking About Godard. New York: New York University Press. Stoekl, Allan. 1985. Introduction. In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Trans. A.  Stoekl. Georges Bataille, ix–xxv. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. 2015. Ksia ˙̨zka wyjścia/The book of exit. Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne Seria Literacka 25 (45): 67–92. Trotter, David. 2000. Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vice, Sue. 2018. Dementia as Cultural Metaphor in Holocaust Narratives. Unpublished workshop paper. Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London. Viney, William. 2014. Waste: A Philosophy of Things. London: Bloomsbury. Walentowska, Beata. 2015. Confessions of a Film Editor. In Polish Cine Art, or the Cinematographic Turn in Polish Contemporary Art, ed. Jakub Majmurek and Łukasz Ronduda, 92–97. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art Political Critiques Publishing House.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Not About, But After

In his exploration of the work of Christian Boltanski, Ernst van Alphen cites the text of an interview with the artist that runs: ‘My work is not about xxxxxxx it is after xxxxxxx’ (1997, 93). The repetitions of ‘x’ constitute what van Alphen calls an ‘unreadable mark’ and indicate a correction to the text made by Boltanski (1997, 120). The x-ed out word, van Alphen suggests, is likely to be ‘Holocaust’ (120). Boltanski has often referred to his work as ‘post-Holocaust’ art; for the artist, van Alphen argues, the Holocaust is a fundamental break in history (1997, 120). According to van Alphen’s interpretation of this text and its correction, Boltanski’s work is not ‘about’ the Holocaust because the Holocaust ‘itself is unreadable’ (120).1 This passage from van Alphen’s work has stayed with me as I have considered how Polish cinema engages with the unwanted knowledge of Polish perpetration during the Holocaust, and specifically with incidents in which some Catholic Poles living in rural areas and small towns robbed and murdered their Jewish neighbours. The three post-millennial films under discussion in this book are part of a wider landscape formed by scholarship on Jedwabne and similar atrocities, yet they are not ‘about’ Jedwabne (a word not spoken in any of them) nor strictly ‘about’ other wartime murders of Jewish Poles. The films do not attempt to re-enact or visualise such events. Instead, they frame their aftermaths, and do so in ways that are fundamentally bound up with what is ‘readable’, knowable and meaningful. Polish aftermath cinema, I have argued, engages with the © The Author(s) 2020 M. Mroz, Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7_7

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structures and processes of coming-to-know about Polish perpetration and bystanding, and inscribes moments of shock that refract the similar expressions of revelation which permeated post-Jedwabne public and scholarly discourse. While the films do so in different ways and with varying political and ethical inflections, this book has pointed to a number of elements that recur across them, such as the return to a home or birthplace that has become negated and inhospitable, and the interminable surveillance mobilised by the simultaneously concrete and amorphous ‘gaze of the neighbour’. Investigative processes might be activated in these films, whereby ‘witnesses’, bystanders and perpetrators are questioned; testimonies and confessions are heard; archives searched; old photographs handled; natural environments ‘read’ for clues; burial sites located and remains exhumed. In most cases, these are staged as fraught and difficult processes; fiction film characters and documentary figures struggle to place whatever is discovered, read and physically grasped into familiar frameworks of understanding. The films tend to give space to those moments where characters and figures come up against the limits of meaning and knowledge: the points where bystanders do not provide further access to history or memory, knowledge is denied and disavowed, identities threatened with erasure, and landscapes and material objects muted. Questions of how to process unwanted knowledge and what to do ‘after such knowledge’ resonate in the face of gaps and silences that can, and often do, become an alibi or refusal of further engagement. Histories in these films, for both characters and viewers, are perforated by elisions and temporal disjunctions, and indicated through framed ‘stains’ or voids. Uncertainty is structured into the films’ unfoldings, as they conjure familiar genres, narrative frameworks, symbolic networks and allegories, while often dissipating and dissolving them. Materialities of various kinds form a network of things that come or remain ‘after’, that is, in the aftermaths of murder, violence, looting or loss. Exhumed bones, heaps of litter, dilapidated gravestones, overgrown ruins, animal corpses, teeming soil, scattered sugar, emissions of light and buoyant vegetation are all part of a posthumous cinematic ecology. The ways in which these material remains are framed have the potential to destabilise, plunge us into ambiguity and bring us up against thresholds of meaning. They are the remnants of what has passed through, but they might also suggest, at times, what is still unspoken, unformulated and not (yet) made visible.

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What Does xxxxxxx Mark? I do not consider Jedwabne or other incidents of Polish violence as inherently ‘unreadable’, to return to van Alphen’s vocabulary (1997, 120). For many scholars, however, such atrocities could not be ‘read’ within the dominant ways of framing Polish–Jewish relations during the Holocaust, calibrated as they were around the Polish Righteous and the innocent witness. Within those framings, Jedwabne appeared as something nonsensical and aberrant, spawning multiple references to blind spots and stains that I have suggested echo the structure of anamorphosis. In order to ‘read’ an atrocity like Jedwabne, a number of scholars argued, one had to shift the frame entirely (see Chaps. 1 and 2). This language of framing and reframing has great resonance for film, and I have traced how Polish aftermath cinema also attempts to process the unwanted knowledge of Polish violence through shifting frames, a practice both conceptual and aesthetic. Iconic images of forests and fields, for example, are reformulated and reframed as ‘non-sites’ of Jewish burial, as ‘landscapes with Jewish corpse’ or ‘landscapes with matzevot’.2 Framing and reframing has also informed my strategy of closely reading the films, and remaining alert to details that don’t always make sense within the narrative framework, generic schema or aesthetic structure, but nevertheless seem to pulsate with significance. In her study of East German WWII cinema, Anke Pinkert has made reference to the ‘small and peculiar moments that do not quite add up to the overall narrative or visual economy of the film’ but that nevertheless condense ‘competing memory strands and elisions’ or ‘partial, and often awkward, efforts to develop a representational language’ around the painful historical issues that are being raised (2008, 12). These might be moments, she argues, of ‘a complex historical knowledge’ that are difficult to read and place into a coherent vision of a film and its supposedly overarching ‘stance’.3 I have argued that the question of knowledge itself emerges as one of these competing tensions in Polish aftermath cinema, as it continually questions what it means to come-to-know and what the stakes of this knowledge are. The desire to investigate and reveal evidence in the face of decades of silence and erasure must also negotiate the danger of instrumentalising knowledge and birthing new clichés that conceal more than they reveal. Further, however, there is no universally accepted kernel of historical truth that the films refer back to. Granted, some of the language of anamorphosis that operates around Jedwabne and similar incidents suggests that such histories are

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always ‘there’, waiting to be found, and at times the films also stage moments where histories seem to be ‘recovered’. Looking across the films as they unfold, however, one can see how coming-to-know operates as a process: of construction, reading, remembering, framing, imagining and imaging, in a dynamic becoming that is shifting and unstable, and which continually produces new visions of the ‘object’ framed. In this light, trying to guess the word erased by Boltanski’s crosses (‘Holocaust’) or substituting different words (‘Jedwabne’ for ‘Holocaust’) to determine what we are ‘after’ might overly limit our enquiry. It is reminiscent of the lure of anamorphosis, in which we ‘solve’ the mystery of the stain by identifying the skull in the blind spot and pinning it down to a concrete meaning. Rather than solving for ‘xxxxxxx’, Boltanski’s corrected interview suggests the difficulties in even formulating an object of knowledge or an experience that we are ‘after’ (let alone thinking ‘about’). Hence I have drawn on particular theoretical and philosophical approaches that worry at the edges of knowledge and not-knowledge, not to return to debates around the incomprehensibility and unrepresentability of atrocity, but rather to consider how coming-to-know is in continual motion as the object one attempts to know shifts and changes. The address of the spectre, the visage and the art image in the work of Derrida, Levinas and Didi-Huberman, as well as Kristeva’s abjection and Bataille’s informe, draw our attention to a spectrum of knowability that, I have argued, the films mobilise in a dynamic process. As well as tracing how something might come to be known or formulated as an object of knowledge, this book has engaged with questions of ‘meaning’, a concept with similar problems of definition to ‘knowledge’. What is ‘meaningful’ or not, and how it becomes so, seems endlessly imprecise and subjective. ‘Meaning’ is one of Bal’s ‘travelling concepts’: no discipline can function without it, she argues, but it is also a word with an ‘over-extended use’ and a dizzying array of possibilities (2002, 27). I have indicated several ways in which meaning, and its relationship to knowledge, is expressed within theory, film-philosophy and cinema itself, recognising that many other possibilities could manifest themselves with different filmic ‘readings’. I’ve suggested that those moments where characters or viewers seem to encounter a voiding of meaning or knowledge might be resonant in other ways. These openings in the films might invite the spectator to reflect, draw out moments of affect and emotion, or encourage an ethical re-orientation. Such moments might become, perhaps paradoxically, multiply resonant, as they open out towards what is not made visible

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or legible within an image: the histories that are not testified to, the crimes not confessed to, the experiences of the victims that we still do not know, the material traces that we haven’t yet found. Though my analyses have often focused on ‘readability’, it is not my intention to consider film simply as a ‘text’. Much important scholarship in, for example, film-phenomenology (particularly that which privileges the senses and affect) and film-philosophy (which champions cinema as a potential site of ethical encounters), has moved us far beyond the parameters of cinema’s textual and linguistic properties. I engage most specifically with ethics in Chap. 3, while suggesting throughout the book that moments of historical revelation or discovery are laden with affective and emotional potential. I have noted how grief, disgust, loss, shock, mourning and fear permeate the experiences of characters and figures in the film, and the formal and aesthetic elements of the films (following in part the approach of Brinkema (2014)). Such affective and emotional states are both conjured in the present and also appear as what Pinkert has termed ‘affective residues’ left over from an initial historical shock or experience, and which persist into the present in modulated forms (2008, 8). Cinema might thus, Pinkert argues, constitute what Cvetkovich has called an ‘archive of feelings’, an enticing suggestion that offers new directions for the work on archival materialities offered in this book (Pinkert 2008, 8).4 My forays into the emotional and affective have been relatively brief, however, and the ways in which affect and emotion might form part of the network of what comes ‘after’ and lives on deserves further investigation.

After Aftermath Cinema Framing provides shape and structure, but it is also an operation of ‘limiting’ (Bal 2002, 133). This book has framed the four films under discussion as ‘Polish’ films, contextualising them within the specificities of Polish historical events and their interpretations by Polish and international scholars. As Davis reminds us, contextualisations are ‘construction[s] based on always questionable interpretive decisions’ (2010, 175). Drawing on Derrida, Davis notes that contexts can never be fully exhausted: ‘our knowledge of the context is always partial, which means that new contexts may be introduced to transform any provisional understanding we have arrived at’ (2010, 176). This book’s deployment of the films as ‘Polish’ represents one edge of one particular frame, but shifting or extending the frame, and the context, would present a different picture. For example,

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the three post-millennial films in this book had significant funding and input from international corporations and funding bodies.5 Ida and It Looks Pretty in particular seem calibrated for a global art-cinema audience. As Halle has noted, a number of questions arise from the transnational nature of European film funding, including how financial considerations might influence filmic narrative and form to appeal to international or European audiences, or be in line with particular European or global political agendas (2010). A number of scholars have, indeed, considered post-Jedwabne cultural work, including film, in such contexts. Pakier, for example, has discussed contemporary Polish cinema as part of a ‘Europeanisation’ of Holocaust memory (2013, 11), situating it within broader currents of Holocaust cultural engagement, such as the turns towards a ‘cosmopolitan memory’ charted by Levy and Sznaider (2006). The (relatively) self-critical Polish engagements with Holocaust history became associated with the process of Polish integration into the European Union in the early 2000s, and often function to promote an image of Poland as a multicultural space in opposition to national-conservative and populist rhetoric.6 In the sphere of film analysis, theory and philosophy, there is also potential for shifting the limits of the book’s current framing to encompass broader global engagements with posthumous materialities and ecologies in the wake of violence and conflict. This book has been informed by scholarship on violence in other global contexts, such as Mbembe’s (2003) and Cieplak’s (2017) work on the aftermaths of the Rwandan genocide, and Martin-Jones’s writing on the legacies of Chilean state violence (2013).7 One should not, of course, conflate the very different situational dynamics of the Rwandan genocide, government-led atrocity in Chile, and Polish violence against Jewish people in German and/or Soviet-­ occupied Poland. A broadening out towards other contexts also requires a counter-operation of narrowing back down into the cultural, historical and political specificities of those regions or nations. As Jinks (2016, 9) has argued, we must recognise ‘how the problems of representing human suffering are refracted by the specificity of each case’, and remain sensitive to points where the theoretical frameworks that one wishes to extend from other contexts ‘may be less applicable, as much as to where they are’. Post-Jedwabne Polish discourse has, in fact, provided one example of how ill-fitting some extensions might be. I am referring to the way in which frameworks of trauma developed in the context of Western scholarship on Holocaust survivors has at times been uncritically applied to the

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Polish (non-Jewish) experience of ‘witnessing’ Jewish death in the Holocaust, which minimises the significance of anti-Semitism and the material benefits arising for Poles from Jewish absence. Such patterns of thought should make us question what the state of being ‘after such knowledge’ might, in practice, really entail. To return once more to the vocabulary of van Alphen’s discussion, the expressions of shock following the Jedwabne revelations seem to indicate that it, too, constituted a ‘fundamental break’, creating what Zubrzycki calls a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ Jedwabne (2013, 99). Undoubtedly, the explosion of this unwanted knowledge onto wider public awareness engendered transformations in the political, social, cultural and scholarly landscape, of which the films under discussion are a part. And yet, it would be difficult to delineate a distinct and homogenous border that divides a ‘before’ of knowing and an ‘after’ where difficult histories are entirely revealed and accepted. Being in the aftermaths is not to be at an end point of a teleological progression towards historical revelation, but rather in a landscape of continual disputes over, and incessant reframings of, unwanted knowledge. Part of the state of being ‘after’ includes the persistence of what Dziuban has called ‘unacknowledged continuities’ between past and present (2019b, 133). We must, then, stay conscious of, and interrogate, how we frame (in) the aftermaths. One has to attend to the possibility that processes of reframing in the wake of unwanted knowledge might be performative and illusory. Indeed, Janicka and Żukowski (2016, 14) argue that in much post-Jedwabne cultural work, revelations of Polish violence are re-absorbed into existing frames: ‘what does not change is the general framework of the dominant narrative even if—on the level of detail—new elements appear in it’. Each film should be evaluated individually against this observation. Ida, for example, retains the damaging connection between Jewishness and Communism, while Aftermath disrupts familiar approaches to WWII so extensively that the Polish Righteous, the German occupiers, and alleged Soviet collaborators are framed out almost entirely. Post-­ Jedwabne visual cultures have developed specific iconographies of the Holocaust, visibilising burning barns, dilapidated gravestones, looted property, and ‘peasant’ killers. Such images have broken through particular evasions and silences around Holocaust history in Poland. Again, however, they have not done so as a politically unified and homogenous force. Furthermore, such reframings have engendered their own clichés, evasions and blind spots, which take their power in part from a reworking of old stereotypes. Representations of a violent rural population, for

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example, often draw on established clichés of Eastern European villages as ‘bewildering and self-contained parallel world[s]’ in opposition to urban modernity (Iordanova 2003, 103). Offering particular visions of unkempt and uneducated ‘peasant’ killers not only makes it easier for many viewers to distance themselves from them (Leder 2014, 91) but also tends to elide the fact that people from all socio-economic backgrounds benefitted from Jewish ‘absence’, and may indeed have hastened it.8 While the actions of some intelligentsia and sections of the Church hierarchy in assisting and rescuing Jewish people have often been charted, the entanglements between these two groups and the ‘peasants’ carrying out robberies and murders remain largely unspoken (Janicka 2018, 72). Boltanski’s ‘xxxxxxx’, then, might also be interpreted as indicating a silencing of further unwanted knowledge that we are not yet truly ‘after’. As awry perspectives give clarity to what was previously only a blur or stain in the frame, new perspectival images are formed and a new ‘given-­ to-­be-seen’ developed (Silverman 1996, 178). Approaches to anamorphosis indicate that we must not rest in the satisfaction of decoding the stain or visibilising some of the skeletons in the closet, as though everything has now been ‘read’ and known. Particularly in the current Polish political climate where questions of accountability and responsibility for WWII-era violence are so frequently shut down, it seems important to engage in continuing processes of interrogation. As the mechanisms behind wartime violence, othering and exclusion persist into our present, this is, finally, what we come-to-know through Polish aftermath cinema: that it will continue to frame us, as we frame it.

Notes 1. Van Alphen does, however, argue that Boltanski’s work refuses a ‘resublimation’ of the Holocaust, despite utilizing some of the language of the sublime (122). 2. See Chap. 2, where I discuss how Sendyka (2017) and Żukowski (2018a) have deployed these terms. 3. See also Rutherford (2004), who considers how ‘indeterminate moments’ from a film might draw the spectator into ‘an engagement with the uncertainty and ambivalence of […] history.’ 4. Pinkert refers here to Ann Cvetkovich’s work in An Archive of Feelings (2003). 5. Ida’s transnational funding sources include support from the independent Danish company Phoenix Film Investments, as well as Eurimages. Aftermath

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had input from Metra films, a Russian production company, and Topkapi films, based in the Netherlands. It Looks Pretty was partly funded by the Anton Kern Gallery in New York. 6. For different critical analyses of these processes, see, for example, Zubrzycki (2010, 2016), and Meng’s discussion of ‘redemptive cosmopolitanism’ (2011, 10). 7. See also, for example, two recent articles that deploy similar frameworks to those in this book: the analysis of earth-archives in filmic engagements with the aftermaths of mass murder in Cambodia (Cazenave 2018), and the discussion of the legacies of political violence in Argentina through animal materialities (O’Brien 2017). 8. See also Dobrosielski (2017, 382), who argues that the promulgation of ‘violent peasant’ stereotypes indicates the extent to which elitist discourse continues to circulate around Holocaust history in Poland.

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Index1

A Abjection, 25, 27, 62–63, 122n13, 212–213, 215, 219–226, 230–233, 236, 237, 239, 242, 243, 244n6, 244n15, 254 See also Kristeva, Julia Abraham, Nicolas, 146–148, 162n16 Adorno, Theodor W., 97, 215, 244n9 Affect, 23, 35n56, 108, 173, 189, 194, 200, 201n1, 213, 220, 222, 225, 230, 237, 244n10, 246n30, 254–255 Aftermath, 3, 14, 18–20, 22, 24, 25, 46–49, 65, 67, 68, 75–76, 78, 79, 129–160, 168, 204n18, 217, 245n23, 257 Agamben, Giorgio, 240–242, 246n36, 246n37 Alaimo, Stacy, 71 Allegory, 22, 23, 25, 48, 212–219, 221, 222, 225, 227, 234, 236, 241–243, 243n3, 244n10, 252

Alterity, 53, 55, 81n8, 92, 95, 100, 102, 104, 110–112, 115, 117, 119–120 The Ambassadors, 6, 27, 45, 47, 66–68, 80, 130, 149, 150, 152 Anamorphosis, 6, 7, 11, 21, 23–27, 45–52, 56, 58, 66–68, 77, 80, 130–132, 148–157, 159, 160, 193, 253, 254, 258 See also Blind spot; Stain Animals, 64, 65, 71, 82n21, 91, 96–98, 114, 115, 122n11, 138, 198–199, 215, 217, 239–242, 245n22, 246n35, 252, 259n7 The Annunciation, 58–59, 178–179, 200 Anti-Semitic graffiti, 137, 139, 149–152, 160n3, 162n19, 162n20

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Mroz, Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7

287

288 

INDEX

Anti-Semitism, 9, 11, 13, 15, 20, 22, 28n4, 30n17, 31n24, 31n25, 32n30, 33n33, 35n55, 48, 51, 53, 97, 103, 133, 136, 138, 139, 149, 150, 152, 160n3, 160n5, 162n17, 162n19, 170, 199, 202n3, 202n5, 204n26, 217, 221, 240, 244n8, 257 Appropriation of property, 2, 13, 15, 19, 20, 51, 64, 65, 72, 77, 91, 93, 94, 120, 140, 147, 171, 175, 211, 216, 221, 222, 230–233, 244n8 See also Looting Archaeology, 8, 24, 26, 72–76, 82n23, 91–92, 98–99, 107–109, 114–117, 121n1, 140–145, 149, 159, 161n14 See also Excavation; Exhumation Archive, 2, 5–8, 10, 14–17, 23, 29n11, 31n22, 50, 73–76, 82n20, 91, 108, 115–116, 120–121, 123n17, 131, 140–145, 149, 159, 161n14, 199, 252, 255 See also Earth as archive Arnold, Agnieszka, 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 16, 34n46, 68, 69, 161n10 Neighbours, 16, 17, 69, 161n10 Where is My Older Son Cain?, 1, 4–10, 16, 28n3, 68, 214, 217 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 5, 28n5, 30n18, 61, 70, 73, 82n19, 244n9, 244n15 B Bachelard, Gaston, 96 Baer, Ulrich, 8, 68 Baksik, Łukasz, 48, 66–68, 131, 161n13, 245n23 Bal, Mieke, 26, 254, 255

Barad, Karen, 26, 60–62 Barn, 2, 7, 17, 29n12, 30n19, 105, 136, 197–199 burning barn, 17, 34n47, 153–156, 257 Bartana, Yael, 14, 33n37 Barthes, Roland, 194–198, 204n24 Bataille, Georges, 25, 61, 81n13, 212, 226–230, 232–234, 236, 243n3, 243n4, 245n19, 245n25, 246n30, 254 See also Formlessness Bauman, Zygmunt, 233 Becoming, 67, 72, 172–176, 181, 189, 190, 216, 219, 225, 231–233, 239, 254 Benjamin, Walter, 74, 156, 212, 215–218, 234 Bennett, Jane, 71, 184 Bergson, Henri, 25, 35n56, 59–60, 92, 108, 170, 172, 173, 176, 200–201, 203n10 Betlejewski, Rafał, 17, 34n48, 156, 162n22 Bikont, Anna, 9, 11, 30n15, 46 Birthplace, 4, 18, 20, 24, 47–49, 55, 65, 68–69, 72, 75–80, 82n24, 91–121, 137–138, 145, 161n11, 168, 181–187, 216, 227 Blindness (Zaćma), 202n6 Blind spot, 45, 46, 50–52, 67, 145, 148–152, 228, 253, 254, 257 See also Anamorphosis; Stain Błoński, Jan, 32n26 Boltanski, Christian, 251, 254–255, 258, 258n1 Bones, see Human remains; Skull Brinkema, Eugenie, 23, 25, 27, 72, 120, 124n25, 167, 187–190, 194, 199, 201n1, 204n20, 228, 236–239, 245n29, 246n30, 255 Burial of a Potato, 216–217

 INDEX 

Burial site, 2, 7, 8, 11, 17–20, 24, 26, 27, 30n19, 49, 62, 64, 65, 69–76, 83n25, 83n26, 91, 97, 98, 107, 113, 114, 120, 123n22, 123n24, 124n26, 131, 141, 157, 171, 172, 184–188, 204n18, 217, 252, 253 See also ‘Non-sites of memory’ Butler, Judith, 119 Bystander, 8, 13, 31n24, 32n29, 34n40, 70, 76–80, 83n28, 162n19, 175–176, 252 in cinema, 4, 20, 31n24, 49, 76–80, 83n27, 91, 94, 105, 110, 111, 114, 120, 136, 139, 175–177, 184, 216, 252 C Catholicism, 135–137, 145, 146, 157, 161n7, 161n8, 169, 171–173, 199 See also Church; Religion Chare, Nicholas, 62, 82n19, 215, 220, 224–226, 240, 244n9 Church, 52, 139, 146, 170, 171, 199, 202n6, 219, 258 See also Catholicism; Religion Cliché, 17, 119, 136, 137, 239, 253, 257, 258 See also Stereotype Close reading, 7, 22–26, 28n6, 80, 158, 169, 202n1, 213, 234, 253 Close-up, 17, 66, 67, 104, 109–114, 117–119, 129, 153, 179–181, 187, 190, 193 See also Face Coming-to-know, 4, 16, 20–22, 47, 48, 52, 61, 110, 131, 132, 152, 182, 252–254, 258 Commemoration, see memory

289

Concentration and death camps, 12, 28n5, 29n8, 60–61, 64, 72, 81n3, 81n16, 98–99, 122n12, 123n23, 124n26, 217, 228, 240–241, 244n9 See also Holocaust; under Individual names Cooper, Sarah, 55, 92, 110–113, 118, 119, 121, 121n2, 124n27 Court proceedings, 12, 31n23, 48, 76, 171–172 Crime fiction, 48, 49, 134, 135 See also Detection; Investigation Critchley, Simon, 53, 100, 113 Cross-cutting, 47, 135, 143–144 See also Montage Crucifixion, 135–137, 161n8, 161n9 Crypt, 146–149, 162n16 D Dardenne, Jean-Pierre and Luc, 118, 119, 124n27 Davis, Colin, 23, 55–57, 81n11, 146–149, 157–159, 160n1, 161n15, 162n18, 188, 255 Death, 1, 3, 7, 8, 12, 19, 27, 30n18, 31n25, 33n39, 54–56, 62, 64, 67–74, 78, 80, 93–95, 101, 104–106, 112, 114, 116, 119–120, 123n23, 124n27, 135–137, 145, 146, 159, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174–176, 178, 181, 190, 194, 196, 198, 199, 215, 217–219, 222, 227, 235, 241–242, 244n15, 257 Death camps, see Concentration and death camps Decomposition, 8, 26–27, 71–73, 115–116, 186, 218, 226 Deconstruction, 55–57, 81n10, 133, 148, 155, 159, 162n21

290 

INDEX

Dehumanisation, 71, 124n26, 239, 244n8 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 24, 74–75, 82n24, 91, 92, 98–99, 108, 112, 121n2, 203n10 and Félix Guattari, 173, 244n14 Demon, 33n38, 48 Depth in the image, 169–170, 176–181, 185, 197 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 7, 24, 29n11, 52, 55–57, 81n9, 81n10, 81n11, 81n12, 105, 129, 130, 132, 133, 138–149, 151, 153–160, 160n1, 161n14, 162n18, 162n21, 194, 203n11, 242, 254, 255 Detection, 48–50, 94, 111, 122n6, 152, 161n14 See also Crime fiction; Investigation Didi-Huberman, Georges, 4–7, 9, 10, 23, 25, 29n8, 52, 57–61, 70, 73, 74, 82n19, 144, 168–170, 172, 177–181, 185, 192–193, 198, 200–201, 216, 244n9, 254 Disgust, 52, 224, 237–240, 243, 246n30, 246n31, 255 Dolar, Mladen, 49–50, 58, 151–152 Domańska, Ewa, 69–72, 83n25 Duration, 25, 35n56, 59–60, 118, 151, 172–175, 200, 201, 203n10, 225 See also Bergson, Henri; Temporality Dziuban, Zuzanna, 15, 25, 32n25, 35n54, 47, 56, 63–64, 69–70, 76, 81n3, 81n16, 83n26, 130, 132, 159, 257 E Earth, 33n39, 62, 63, 65, 68–75, 82n19, 91, 92, 98, 99, 108–109, 111, 113–117, 123n17, 134, 135, 141, 149, 168, 181–188, 195, 196

as active soil, 8, 27, 63, 68–74, 218, 252 as archive, 24, 27, 73–76, 91, 108, 115–116, 123n17, 144, 145, 186, 259n7 See also Ecology; Environment Ecology, 27, 68–72, 75, 92, 114, 145, 252 See also Earth; Environment; Posthumous ecology Ecosystem, see Ecology Ellipsis, 23, 27, 47, 68, 76, 115, 116, 184–186, 235 Elsaesser, Thomas, 213, 220, 221, 224, 233, 239, 244n6, 245n24 Engelking, Barbara, 12, 13, 20, 175–176, 211, 221 Environment, 7, 8, 26, 63, 66, 68–74, 96, 97, 101, 113, 129, 140, 141, 150, 184–185, 187, 218, 226, 231, 237, 252 See also Ecology; Landscape Ethics, 4, 7, 16, 24, 51–56, 71, 78, 80, 81n9, 92–94, 100–107, 109–113, 117–121, 121n2, 123n18, 124n27, 130, 156, 157, 159, 223, 238, 242, 245n20, 252, 254, 255 Evasion, 9, 18, 27, 32n25, 50–52, 181, 257 See also Silencing Evidence, 7, 31n25, 49, 50, 61, 70, 76, 83n26, 92, 115, 116, 131, 144, 145, 149, 159, 195, 253 Excavation, 24, 26, 27, 73–76, 83n25, 83n26, 91, 100, 107–109, 113–117, 121, 121n1, 123n21, 123n22, 131, 137, 141–142, 145, 157, 161n14, 168, 181–188, 196, 204n18 See also Archaeology; Exhumation

 INDEX 

Exhumation, 20, 26, 27, 30n19, 47, 49, 71, 75, 76, 78, 83n25, 94, 120, 129, 145, 252 See also Archaeology; Excavation F Face, 7, 16, 17, 24, 27, 54–56, 58, 77, 91–92, 101, 104, 106–119, 121n2, 124n27, 173, 177–181, 189–192, 223, 226, 233, 254 in close-up, 104, 109, 111–113, 117, 119, 177, 179–181 face-to-face, 27, 53, 55, 59, 92, 94, 100, 102, 103, 107, 112, 115, 117, 119, 137, 145, 178, 186, 192, 200, 245n20 Faith, 170, 177, 193, 203n14 Fear, 1, 12, 17, 48, 92, 94, 98, 105–107, 137, 214, 255 Felman, Shoshana, 81n6, 82n22 Field, 17, 18, 47, 63–67, 72, 91, 96, 114, 139, 142, 143, 146, 151, 153, 157, 184–185, 237, 253 of vision, 6, 46, 47, 50, 54, 66, 111, 118, 132, 149, 151, 184–186, 197 See also Landscape Forbidden Songs, 142 Forecki, Piotr, 13, 19, 30n19, 31n24, 133, 171, 244n8 Forensics, 8, 70, 76, 83n25 Forest, 20, 47, 63–66, 79, 81n15, 82n20, 97, 103, 105, 129, 134, 141, 142, 148, 151, 157, 182, 184–185, 215, 223, 235, 240, 253 See also Landscape Formlessness, 23, 25, 61, 212, 213, 219, 223–230, 233, 236, 242, 243n4, 254 See also Bataille, Georges

291

Freud, Sigmund, 58, 74, 82n23, 120, 130, 147, 188, 189 See also Psychoanalysis Fulbrook, Mary, 32n27, 76, 176 Funding, 19, 256, 258n5 G Gaze, 8, 46, 58, 66, 76–80, 80n1, 98, 121n1, 190–193, 197, 200, 237, 238, 252 of the neighbour, 12, 76–80, 106–107, 117, 130, 147–148, 152, 184, 218, 252 Genocide, 4, 5, 15, 27, 34n41, 34n42, 64, 69, 71, 73, 76, 124n26, 240, 256 See also Holocaust; Rwandan genocide Genre, 4, 18, 22, 29n6, 49, 50, 131, 133–137, 148, 156, 160, 160n5, 160n6, 252 German occupation, 1, 3, 11, 13, 15, 18, 29n10, 29n12, 30n18, 30n21, 31n22, 33n40, 46, 64, 69, 83n28, 93, 106, 111, 124n26, 139, 142, 175, 201, 202n7, 221, 244n8, 246n35, 256, 257 See also Holocaust Glowacka, Dorota, 95, 119, 170 Godard, Jean-Luc, 29n9, 34n42, 213, 232 Gordon, Avery, 130, 145 Grabowski, Jan, 12, 13, 32n28, 199, 240, 244n8 Grain of Truth, 49 Grave, see Burial site Gravestone, 18, 48, 66–68, 72, 131, 137, 140, 142–147, 153–159, 161n13, 187, 245n23, 252, 253, 257

292 

INDEX

Grief, 25, 68, 78, 120, 124n25, 159, 167, 170, 181, 188–199, 255 See also Loss Gross, Jan T., 2, 9–13, 15, 19–21, 28n2, 29n10, 29n12, 30n19, 31n22, 32n30, 33n40, 35n49, 46–51, 54, 116, 124n26, 131, 144, 161n13, 162n17, 211, 214, 230, 244n12, 244n13 Fear, 28n4, 32n30 Golden Harvest, 28n4, 64, 81n16, 116, 124n26 Neighbours, 2, 4, 6, 10–12, 16, 17, 19, 28n4, 29n10, 30n16, 50, 54, 131, 144, 211, 214 Grudzińska-Gross, Irena, 11–13, 28n4, 64, 116, 124n26 Grynberg, Abram, 18, 47, 69, 72, 91, 94, 95, 97, 101–108, 110, 112, 114–117, 120, 123n24, 184–186, 216 Grynberg, Henryk, 18, 24, 68–70, 75, 77, 78, 91–119, 121n1, 122n5, 122n6, 122n7, 122n9, 123n21, 123n22, 137, 145, 161n8, 183, 185–186, 199–200, 216 H Hamlet, 138, 140, 144, 145, 147, 161n14, 162n17 Haptic, 61, 179, 180, 236 See also Texture; Touch Haraway, Donna, 71–72 Haunting, 14, 15, 55–58, 82n23, 129–134, 138–149, 152–160, 161n14 See also Hauntology; Spectrality Hauntology, 24, 55–58, 141, 146–148, 157, 194 See also Derrida, Jacques; Haunting; Spectrality

Hilberg, Raul, 31n24, 83n28, 175 Hoffman, Eva, 30n17, 46 Holocaust, 3–7, 11–14, 28n5, 29n13, 30n20, 30n21, 31n24, 31n25, 35n54, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 62, 65, 69–70, 76, 82n21, 92, 93, 96–98, 100, 119, 121n1, 122n5, 124n25, 124n26, 133, 155, 161n7, 170, 175–177, 199, 203n13, 216–219, 221, 227, 240, 244n8, 244n15, 245n22, 246n36, 251, 253, 254, 256, 257, 259n8 by bullets, 30n21 Holocaust law, 32n30 and visual cultures, 7, 8, 14–20, 22, 25, 29n6, 29n13, 34n47, 35n49, 60–62, 64, 65, 78, 83n27, 83n28, 91, 93, 96, 97, 99, 109, 121n1, 123n16, 155, 168, 170–172, 175–177, 181, 212, 216–219, 226–228, 251, 257 See also German occupation Home, 13, 20, 26, 27, 54, 62, 68, 92, 93, 95–107, 129, 132, 138, 140–142, 155, 177, 182–184, 211, 214, 217, 218, 224–226, 230, 231, 234, 236, 241, 252 homecoming, 92, 93, 96–98, 104, 151, 217 See also Returns Human remains, 8, 18–20, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30n19, 47, 60–63, 69–76, 78, 81n14, 83n26, 91, 97, 108, 109, 114–116, 118, 120, 123n17, 123n22, 124n26, 129–131, 134, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142, 145, 146, 157, 168, 181–187, 204n18, 252 See also Burial sites; Skull

 INDEX 

I Icon, 2, 16, 17, 23, 34n47, 63, 64, 133–137, 151, 155, 160, 253, 257 Ida, 3, 14, 19, 20, 25, 35n50, 35n51, 47–49, 65, 67–68, 75, 76, 78, 97, 120, 137, 167–201, 217, 228, 256, 257, 258n5 In Darkness, 34n49 Indexicality, 167, 195, 197–198, 226 Informe, see Formlessness Insdorf, Annette, 30n14, 93, 96, 98, 181 Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), 11, 30n19, 48, 83n26 Intertextuality, 22, 133–138, 146, 160 Investigation, 4, 7, 11, 14, 20, 22, 30n15, 30n19, 48–50, 52, 58, 76, 83n26, 91, 93–95, 107–108, 114, 121n1, 122n6, 134, 136, 137, 146, 147, 152, 157, 160n6, 168, 181, 252, 253 See also Detection It Looks Pretty From A Distance, 3, 14, 20, 22, 25, 47, 52, 62–63, 65, 68, 69, 78, 79, 211–243, 256, 259n5 J Janicka, Elżbieta, 12–15, 19, 30n15, 30n20, 31n25, 32n29, 33n33, 34n48, 46, 51, 64, 72, 77, 78, 81n3, 82n17, 131, 132, 136, 138, 146, 158, 160n5, 161n7, 161n10, 162n19, 204n26, 257, 258 Jedwabne, 1–11, 14–19, 28n2, 28n3, 28n4, 28n5, 29n10, 30n17, 30n18, 30n19, 32n30, 33n40, 34n43, 46–48, 50, 51, 54, 64, 72, 76, 81n5, 81n8, 83n26, 104,

293

132, 144, 158–159, 201, 214, 251, 253, 254, 257 in visual cultures, 1–10, 14–18, 21, 28n2, 28n3, 33n40, 34n43, 34n46, 46–48, 64, 66, 68, 76, 77, 120, 137, 155, 156, 158, 201, 211, 214, 217, 251, 257 Jinks, Rebecca, 34n41, 256 K Kenaan, Hagi, 53, 54, 58, 104, 111 Kristeva, Julia, 4, 25, 61–63, 212–213, 215–216, 219–225, 237, 243, 244n15, 254 See also Abjection L Lacan, Jacques, 6, 45, 46, 56–58, 77, 80n1, 81n11, 130, 151–153, 156, 159, 160n1 See also Anamorphosis; Gaze; Psychoanalysis LaCapra, Dominick, 51, 81n6, 204n19, 227, 240, 245n22, 246n37 Landscape, 3, 6–9, 23, 24, 26, 27, 46, 63–69, 72, 74, 75, 91, 93, 95–101, 104–109, 112–116, 130, 132, 147, 149–151, 162n19, 176, 178, 184–186, 217–219, 231, 234, 237, 238, 252, 253 See also Environment; Field; Forest Langford, Michelle, 212, 216, 217, 219 Lanzmann, Claude, 8, 29n8, 31n24, 34n42, 64, 65, 81n6, 93, 98, 110, 122n6, 123n18 See also Shoah Leder, Andrzej, 13, 170, 171, 258

294 

INDEX

Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 24, 52–58, 81n7, 81n9, 92–93, 95, 100–107, 109–111, 113, 115, 117–120, 121n2, 122n12, 122n13, 124n25, 124n26, 124n27, 254 Light, 58–59, 167, 169, 178–180, 187, 188, 190, 194–200, 212, 226–230, 252 Lipecka, Zofia, 16 Litter, 69, 204n23, 213, 230, 231, 234–236, 252 See also Mess; Waste Looking, 6–8, 11, 12, 21, 23–25, 32n29, 45–48, 54–56, 66, 76–80, 82n22, 83n28, 95, 98, 112, 114, 115, 122n10, 122n11, 130, 132, 147–149, 180, 190–193, 218, 226–228, 237 back, 23–25, 56, 58, 66–68, 79, 80, 98, 108, 109, 130, 132, 147–157, 159, 192–193 See also Gaze; Spectatorship Looting, 2, 9, 10, 25, 31n22, 48, 64, 69, 78, 97, 201, 211, 214–217, 222, 225, 228, 230–232, 252, 257 See also Appropriation of property Loss, 14, 25, 117, 167–172, 177, 180, 181, 187–199, 252, 255 See also Grief Łoziński, Paweł, 4, 18, 91, 93–94, 110, 120, 122n6, 137, 145, 168, 181, 184 See also Birthplace Lyotard, Jean-François, 81n6, 82n21, 119, 225 M Ma ̨ka-Malatyńska, Katarzyna, 17, 18, 28n6, 94, 95, 115, 123n23 Marks, Laura, 24, 75, 107–108, 114–117, 179, 180, 195, 245n28

Martin-Jones, David, 82n24, 108, 115, 123n17, 173, 176, 203n9, 256 Marzynski, Marian, 137 See also Shtetl Materiality, 7, 22–24, 26, 27, 56, 58–65, 68–76, 82n19, 92, 95–98, 108, 109, 113–116, 120, 121, 121n1, 129–131, 143–145, 153, 155, 156, 158, 167–170, 178–187, 189, 193–196, 200, 213, 220, 226, 233–237, 252, 255, 256, 259n7 Matzeva, see Gravestone Mbembe, Achille, 62, 81n14, 256 Memorial, 11, 30n17, 35n54, 157–159 Memory, 4, 8, 12, 14, 18, 21, 23, 27, 29n11, 46, 55, 56, 68, 74, 75, 78, 91, 92, 94–100, 102–109, 111–118, 120, 121, 130, 132, 141, 144, 155, 157–159, 170–172, 181–186, 199–200, 226–230, 252, 253, 255–256 Mess, 25, 26, 63, 198–199, 204n23, 213, 230, 233–237, 242 Metaphor, 24, 26, 61, 62, 70, 75, 76, 82n23, 91, 95, 97, 100, 107, 114, 116–117, 168, 172, 212, 225, 236, 240, 243n2, 244n10, 246n35 See also Symbolism Montage, 5, 6, 26, 29n9, 143–144 See also Cross-cutting Monument, see Memorial Mourning, 15, 55, 117, 120, 129, 157–159, 188–190, 194, 199, 255 N Nałkowska, Zofia, 123n23 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 136, 161n9

 INDEX 

Nazi Germany, see German occupation; Holocaust Neighbours, 3, 8–12, 15, 18–21, 29n12, 48, 52–55, 77, 78, 92, 99–106, 117, 118, 130, 137, 142, 147, 148, 152, 155, 159, 176, 181, 184, 211, 212, 215, 217, 218, 221, 230, 251, 252 Night and Fog, 60–61, 72 Noise, 224–226 Non-sites of memory, 8, 18, 20, 68–69, 72, 83n25, 114, 141, 184, 235, 253 Nostalgia for the Light, 108 O Open secret, 13, 216, 227, 244n11 Othering, 3, 10, 14, 15, 22, 28n1, 48, 49, 51, 53, 56, 98, 102, 104, 138, 139, 156, 181, 212, 213, 216–219, 221, 222, 227, 233–235, 239, 242, 245n19, 258 Overreading, 23, 24, 55 P Painting, 6, 45, 57–60, 64–68, 130, 149–151, 178–181, 200, 211, 234, 237, 238, 243n1, 245n21 See also under Individual paintings Pakier, Małgorzata, 29n6, 217, 255–256 Parallel editing, see Cross-­ cutting; Montage Pasikowski, Władysław, 3, 18, 19, 27, 46, 121, 131–134, 137, 138, 160n4, 161n8, 168 See also Aftermath Pawlikowski, Paweł, 3, 19, 20, 49, 97, 120, 121, 167, 170, 177, 181, 202n6, 203n15 See also Ida

295

Peasant, 51, 52, 64, 239, 257, 258, 259n8 Perpetration, 1–7, 9, 11–17, 19, 20, 27, 28n4, 29n6, 31n23, 31n24, 32n27, 34n40, 47–52, 64, 75–80, 83n28, 91, 94, 104, 105, 107, 111, 115, 120, 129, 130, 132, 135, 136, 138–140, 142, 144–148, 161n11, 161n12, 162n17, 170, 175–176, 201, 216, 239, 240, 251, 252 Phenomenology, 59, 83n28, 198, 203n12, 255 Photography, 5, 8, 14–16, 29n8, 34n48, 48, 64, 66–68, 73, 81n3, 81n16, 82n18, 116, 131, 142, 161n13, 162n19, 167, 172–174, 181, 191, 193–199, 203n9, 204n24, 244n9, 252 Pick, Anat, 26, 97, 98, 241, 246n36 Pinkert, Anke, 253, 255, 258n4 Plant life, 8, 27, 61, 68–74, 218, 234, 252 See also Ecology; Environment; Field; Forest Posthuman, 8, 27, 69–72, 195, 226 Posthumanities, see Posthuman Posthumous, 8, 24, 27, 68–76, 92, 95, 113–117, 141, 184–185, 187, 218, 256 posthumous ecology, 27, 68–72, 75, 92, 145, 252, 256 See also Burial sites; Death; Human remains Post-Jewish, 15, 215, 217, 222, 244n8 Prager, Brad, 70, 76, 105, 114, 121n1, 122n6, 123n22, 186 Psychoanalysis, 6, 56–57, 70, 74, 82n23, 130, 146–157, 159, 162n18, 162n21 See also Anamorphosis; Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques; Silverman, Kaja

296 

INDEX

R Rancière, Jacques, 139, 161n12 Readability, 5–8, 22–24, 27, 50, 55, 58, 59, 68–71, 73–75, 99, 111, 112, 116, 143, 144, 172, 177–181, 200, 212, 217–219, 235, 236, 241, 242, 251–255, 258 See also Close reading Recollection-objects, 114–115, 195 Reconstruction, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16, 17, 21, 212, 215, 216 See also Re-enactment Re-enactment, 16, 34n43, 34n44, 139, 140, 161n12, 251 See also Re-construction Religion, 31n24, 83n25, 83n26, 131, 135–137, 145, 161n7, 161n8, 169, 177, 187, 191–193, 198, 202n6, 219 See also Catholicism; Church Rescue, 3, 9, 13, 14, 34n49, 93, 96, 100–106, 170, 175–176, 201, 202n7, 258 See also Righteous Among the Nations Resnais, Alain, see Night and Fog Returns, 8–9, 14, 18, 19, 24, 26, 27, 30n14, 32n28, 91–102, 112, 116, 118, 129, 130, 137–138, 141, 147, 161n11, 168, 171, 181–184, 187, 199, 200, 203n15, 216, 217, 223, 252 See also Homecoming Righteous Among the Nations, 3, 35n52, 253, 257 See also Rescue Rodowick, D. N., 74, 98–100 Ruin, 26, 98, 131, 134, 141, 142, 217, 218, 234, 252 Rural space, 3, 5, 12, 17, 18, 29n6, 30n21, 33n39, 52, 65, 67, 95,

97, 107, 113, 129, 137, 138, 149–151, 155, 175, 176, 211, 212, 215, 231, 238, 240, 251, 257 See also Environment; Field; Forest; Landscape Russian WWII forces, see Soviet WWII forces Rwandan genocide, 15, 34n42, 81n14, 256 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 61 Sasnal, Anka and Wilhelm, 3, 20, 25, 65, 211, 214–215, 222–226, 230, 239, 240, 242, 243n1, 245n19, 246n33, 246n34 ‘It Looks Pretty From A Distance’ (Anka Sasnal), 214–215, 222–227, 231, 236, 239–241, 244n7 Las (Forest) (Wilhelm Sasnal), 65, 243n1 Sun, The Sun Blinded Me, The, 245n19 See also It Looks Pretty From A Distance Saxton, Libby, 5, 15, 16, 34n42, 54, 55, 81n9, 92, 110–113, 117, 123n18, 123n20 The Secret, 49 Sendyka, Roma, 8, 68–70, 77, 80, 114, 141, 161n7, 184, 235, 258n2 See also ‘Non-sites of memory’ Shoah, 31n24, 64, 65, 82n20, 82n22, 93, 98–100, 110–113, 122n4, 122n6, 123n18, 123n20, 161n10 See also Lanzmann, Claude Shock, 2, 11, 17, 21, 22, 46–50, 131, 135, 145, 173, 186, 211, 252, 255, 257 narrative shock, 11, 16, 21, 131, 135

 INDEX 

Shtetl, 137, 146 Silencing, 4, 9, 23, 27, 49–52, 75, 82n21, 92, 94, 105, 107, 114, 118–121, 140, 141, 147, 168, 171, 181, 184, 216, 257, 258 See also Evasion Silverman, Kaja, 4, 45, 46, 66–68, 80, 151, 213, 232, 258 See also Anamorphosis Skull, 6, 27, 45, 47, 49, 64, 66, 67, 77, 115–116, 120, 137, 145, 149, 151, 185–186, 254 See also Anamorphosis; Human remains Smarzowski, Wojciech, 34n43 Sobchack, Vivian, 152, 153, 156–157, 159 Sobibór, 65 Soil, see Earth Soviet WWII forces, 6, 13, 19, 31n22, 256 Spargo, R. Clifton, 53, 54, 100–102, 119–120, 122n13 Spectacle, 1, 7, 17, 78, 83n28, 114, 135, 139, 214 Spectatorship, 12, 22, 77–80, 112, 121, 133, 149–157, 184, 219, 236–239 See also Looking Spectrality, 14, 15, 24, 25, 52, 55–58, 81n10, 82n23, 102, 129–134, 138–143, 145–149, 152–160, 160n1, 161n14, 162n18, 194, 195, 254 See also Derrida, Jacques; Haunting; Hauntology Stain, 6, 27, 45, 46, 49–51, 66, 130–132, 149–153, 159, 252, 253, 258 See also Anamorphosis; Blind spot Stereotype, 20, 53, 169, 175, 202n3, 233, 257, 259n8 See also Cliché

297

Stratigraphic images, 24, 74–75, 91, 92, 98–100 See also Deleuze, Gilles Symbolism, 22, 23, 25, 26, 30n18, 33n39, 49, 58, 59, 61, 77, 100, 120, 131, 133–137, 142, 146, 153, 157, 158, 169, 172–181, 200–201, 225, 226, 230, 252 See also Metaphor Szaflarska, Danuta, 142 T Tableau, 115, 117, 190 Temporality, 23, 25, 26, 35n56, 47, 57, 59–60, 67, 68, 74, 80, 92, 95, 108, 115, 116, 120, 121n2, 138–142, 144, 151, 156, 170, 172–176, 184–186, 195, 199–201, 203n10, 216, 225, 235, 236, 252 See also Duration Testimony, 1, 2, 5–7, 9, 10, 16, 28n2, 28n3, 32n25, 46, 48, 69, 70, 75, 77, 82n21, 97, 101–103, 108–110, 112, 113, 116, 119, 123n14, 141–142, 176, 214, 226, 252, 255 Texture, 109, 169–170, 175–181, 195 See also Touch Time, see Temporality The Time of Stones, 142–143 Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna, 12, 13, 19, 31n22, 31n23, 31n24, 33n39, 81n4, 136, 244n11, 246n37 Tombstone, see Gravestone Torok, Maria, 146–148, 162n16 Touch, 7, 61, 113, 143, 144, 175, 179, 180, 193–198 See also Texture Transnational, 19, 255–256, 258n5

298 

INDEX

Trauma, 13, 15, 31n25, 51, 56, 70, 82n22, 113, 116, 130, 246n37, 256 Treblinka, 64, 83n25 Trigg, Dylan, 62, 96, 98–99, 181 Trotter, David, 25, 27, 61, 62, 198, 204n24, 213, 227, 230, 233–234, 236–238, 245n21 U Unacknowledged continuity, 25, 130–133, 138, 145, 153, 159, 257 Unwanted images, 5, 9, 15–17, 52, 243 Unwanted knowledge, 1–5, 9, 11, 22, 25, 27, 28n4, 46, 48–50, 52, 114, 131, 135, 145, 170, 201, 243, 251–253, 256–258 V Van Alphen, Ernst, 251, 253, 257, 258n1 Visage, see Face W Waste, 25, 63, 69, 141, 204n23, 213, 221, 228, 230–234, 236, 240, 242, 245n24, 245n26 See also Litter; Mess

Weekend, 213, 232 Wilczyk, Wojciech, 162n19 Wilson, Emma, 60–61 Witness, 3, 6–8, 13, 29n13, 31n24, 31–32n25, 32n26, 32n29, 34n45, 49, 69–71, 75–79, 82n21, 82n22, 83n28, 103, 110–113, 118, 141–142, 176, 195, 196, 226, 252, 253, 257 material witness, 69, 70, 82n19, 82n21, 195, 196, 226 Wylie, John, 35n57, 75, 91, 117, 191 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 150–151, 160n1 Zubrzycki, Geneviève, 3, 11, 17, 30n18, 32n30, 33n34, 34n48, 35n55, 46, 49, 131, 133, 136, 204n25, 257, 259n6 Żukowski, Tomasz, 6, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 28n4, 30n20, 32n26, 34n46, 34n48, 46, 49, 50, 65, 67, 78, 93, 114, 131, 136, 151, 158, 160n6, 161n7, 162n19, 170, 257, 258n2 Żydokomuna, 6, 20, 175 Zylinska, Joanna, 10, 30n16, 53–54, 81n8, 104, 170