Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory

221 Pages·2019·2.371 MB·English

by  Victoria Grace Walden

CINEMATIC
INTERMEDIALITIES
AND CONTEMPORARY
HOLOCAUST MEMORY
VICTORIA GRACE WALDEN
Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary
Holocaust Memory
Victoria Grace Walden
Cinematic
Intermedialities
and Contemporary
Holocaust Memory
Victoria Grace Walden
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-10876-2 ISBN 978-3-030-10877-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10877-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967757
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A
cknowledgements
Cinematic Intermedialities is a book that recognises the agency of both
humans and non-humans in the production of Holocaust memory, it is
thus fitting that I acknowledge not only the people who have supported
this work, but also the experiences and encounters with things that have
inspired it. This book would not have been written were it not for the
countless trips to a variety of former killings sites across Europe, from the
forests of Lithuania and Latvia to the Nazi death camps now transformed
into memorials and museums in Poland, from contemporary memori-
als in Berlin to abandoned and forgotten ruins in Alderney, the Channel
Islands. Since my first Holocaust research trip in 2010, I have been
inquisitive about the relationship between film, and screen media more
broadly, and the topography of Holocaust memory, and I cannot forget
the influence that visiting these places has had on my work, particularly
my fascination with the material remnants that point to absence, and my
gravitation towards films that foreground victims as individual people.
I also cannot forget how paying close attention to the movements
of natural landscapes whilst distracted from reading or writing turned
out to be a fruitful form of procrastination, as it informed my read-
ing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of ‘the assemblage’.
Passing the volatile Vesuvius whilst I sat on an Italian train on respite
during a self-imposed writing retreat ignited images of enfolding mat-
ter in my imagination. Seeing the molds of human skeletons at nearby
Herculaneum that were trapped in their final poses thanks to the famous
eruption, reminded me of the very material affect environmental things
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
can have on our bodies. Whilst sitting on the beach at Hove, a moment
of writer’s block encouraged me to attend to the sea water shifting peb-
bles around. Here, I observed the flow of affects played out as material
performance between liquid and solid, without any human interaction.
These experiences during the writing process had a profound effect on
my interpretation of the French writers’ geological examples of assem-
blages. As someone that had started to define themselves as a phenome-
nologist and thus was resistant to Deleuze’s writing, I saw the poetry of
his and Guattari’s ideas in action in these locations, and they changed the
way I looked at film, the material world, and philosophy.
Now to turn to the people, who have undoubtedly been more influ-
ential, inspirational and supportive than the places mentioned above.
I would like to thank my fellow teachers at Queen Mary’s College,
Basingstoke, who, all those years ago, despite their busy schedules,
encouraged me to write and engage in the wider film and media commu-
nity from the beginning of my teaching career, and provided the stim-
ulating academic discussions that gave me the confidence to pursue a
Ph.D. Although many of them no longer work at Queen Mary’s, I want
to recognise the support and passion of Roy Ashbury, Jane Stables, Lee
Bone and Ian Keetch particularly.
I must also thank the many colleagues at Queen Mary, University
of London who supported me through my Ph.D., particularly Guy
Westwell, Jenny Chamarette, Oliver Kenny, Lucy Bolton, Nick Jones and
Janet Harbord. Special thanks goes to my supervisors Libby Saxton and
Jeremy Hicks, who continually provided invaluable advice both in rela-
tion to my writing and in regards to my plans to pursue an academic
career. I am hugely indebted to both of them. I must also show my
gratitude to the Thinking Writing team and Graduate School at Queen
Mary for their training and support. All of the staff at QMUL offered
such kindness and provided a wonderfully collegial atmosphere; I feel
honoured to have worked with them. I must also thank the School of
Languages, Linguistics and Film, and the Graduate School for provid-
ing funds for several research trips and conferences, which supported this
research.
More recently, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by inspira-
tional and dear colleagues at the University of Sussex, where I have
worked since the writing up stage of my Ph.D. through the time it
has taken to develop this book, which is a very different piece of writ-
ing from my thesis. The shifts in my thinking have undoubtedly been
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
influenced by working in the School of Media, Film and Music, which
is an exciting intellectual hub for memory studies, and research into the
digital. Special thanks goes to Matilda Mroz and Piotr Cieplak, who
took the time to review and provide thoughtful feedback on this man-
uscript, and also to James Harvey, who whilst not a colleague at Sussex,
has offered the same support and great friendship. I would also like
to thank the anonymous reviewers, who left me with several thoughts
for reflection, which have stimulated my intellectual growth and, I
hope, strengthened my argument too. I must particularly thank Barry
Langford, who along with Matilda Mroz, offered fruitful suggestions for
developing my thesis into a monograph during my viva examination.
Thanks must also go to those whose contributions and communi-
cation specifically informed the content of this research. These include
Luboš Gregor; Maciek Zabierowski at the Auschwitz Jewish Center;
Adam Kerpel-Fronius, curator at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews
of Europe; Teresa Zbrzeska at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial
Museum; Sytse Wierenga and Stephanie Billib, who were kind enough
to meet with me and setup their ‘Hier: Raum für Erinnerung’ (‘Here:
Space for Memory’) installation at the Bergen-Belsen memorial; and
staff at the Yad Vashem visual archives. I also want to thank those who
have provided academically stimulating discussions and emotional sup-
port throughout this process, including Sam Mitschke and Alasdair
Richardson, and Imogen Dalziel who accompanied me on one of my
many research trips to visit Holocaust memorial museums.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I want to thank my mother
Lesley Walden, who has always made sacrifices to enable me to pursue
my academic ambitions and who proofread many early versions of my
Ph.D. thesis for me. I am sure she was most relieved when I submitted,
knowing she would never have to read it again.
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 Holocaust Film Beyond Representation 13
3 The Archive, Assemblage and Archaeology 71
4 Animation, Assemblage, the Affection-Form 113
5 Digital Augmentation, Assemblage, the Actual
and the Virtual 155
6 Epilogue 201
Index 211
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
What does it mean to read a book about the space inbetween audio-
visual moving images? This experience is already characterised by what
is missing, from images not seen or those condensed into low resolu-
tion black-and-white snapshots, to the movement between images so
fundamental to cinema and the experience of being before the screen.
By asking you to read my words about film, I am already requesting
your imaginative investment and for you to delve inbetween written lan-
guage and the cinematic examples discussed in this book and thus to
contemplate the impact intermediality can have for Holocaust memory.
This is a book about the inter. In her Deleuzian, yet phenomenologi-
cal, investigation of intercultural cinema, Laura U. Marks argues that to
read or hear an image ‘is to look / listen not for what’s there but for
the gaps’ (2000, p. 311). Like Marks, Cinematic Intermedialities and
Contemporary Holocaust Memory asks you to attend to the spaces inbe-
tween images, and inbetween media in order to read films, an installation
and an app as more than their representational values.
This book began as a reaction to much of the existing literature about
the representation of the Holocaust onscreen. It started with a simple
question, ‘how do we experience Holocaust films?’ Whilst so much writ-
ing about the Holocaust and cinema seemed fixated on factual veracity,
I was frustrated by this. As a film scholar, I do not see historical accu-
racy as cinema’s raison d’être. However, given the strong reactions to
such films, I became interested in how this medium could provoke these
© The Author(s) 2019 1
V. G. Walden, Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary
Holocaust Memory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10877-9_1
2 V. G. WALDEN
responses. Phenomenology, it seemed, was the most useful approach
to adopt. Yet, like all academic research, this project evolved. It devel-
oped into something far beyond my initial question and method. As I
was searching for case studies that would illustrate the breadth of con-
temporary screen media representations of the Holocaust, I discovered
that the works to which I was most drawn all shared a similar obsession
with older media forms, from celluloid home movies to analogue fam-
ily photographs, from survivor memories to paper testimonies written by
those who knew the dead, which remain the only material evidence that
these people once lived. Not only, like all cinema, are these works inter-
medial, but they explicitly engage with the relationships between their
different media. Simultaneously, the more I immersed myself in phenom-
enology and tried to resist Deleuzian approaches to affect (a resistance
based on no substantial rationale bar a stubborn wont to avoid the most
‘in vogue’ theory of the time), the more I found myself intellectually
fascinated with the latter. I found myself, like my case studies, tackling
an inbetween, which for me was characterised by intellectual circles that
suggested they were antagonist to each other yet in dialogue opened up
a fascinating space for rigorous interrogation of the film experience not
simply as text, or material object, or thing-in-itself, or embodied expe-
rience but as a combination of all these and as things-in-relation to each
other. Somewhere between Georges Didi-Huberman’s phenomenologi-
cal re-reading of Jacques Lacan; Gilles Deleuze’s anti-psychoanalysis and
anti-phenomenological post-structuralist approach to film alongside his
work with Felix Guattari; and film phenomenology, emerged a complex
picture of cinema as all of the above.
This book interrogates the many gaps—or inbetweens—that charac-
terise the cinematic experience. Those moments of contact which signify
the meeting of different media and images, and the encounter between
spectator and film. It is not satisfied with simply looking at the rep-
resentational dimensions of the image inscribed into its visual surface and
the soundtrack. Instead it delves deep into the inbetween spaces of cin-
ema—between images, between different media, between the past and
the present, and between bodies and things on and offscreen to consider
how contemporary screen works that are intermedially reflexive encour-
age the production of Holocaust memory. But what does this term
‘intermedially reflexive’ mean? There is a growing amount of literature
interested in intermedial cinema projects, yet as much of this writing rec-
ognises, cinema is and always has been intermedial—it always involves