Revictimization of Holocaust Survivors in the Contemporary Filmic Landscape - Essay Example

?Re-victimisation of Holocaust Survivors in the Contemporary Filmic Landscape Introduction Filmmakers’ exploitation of the Holocaust as an underlyingmoral perspective assumes varied forms. In a number of cases, filmmakers’ use of the Holocaust has turned into an issue of fierce debate, illustrating the power of the film as a cultural instrument and the degree to which the Holocaust is depicted on screen has itself turned into a subject of public outcry. Susan Sontag argues that “one’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau... nothing I have seen... ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously” (Shandler 1999, 212). Susan Sontag reveals in this statement that Holocaust victims are chronically re-victimised by the manner they are represented in films. This paper is an attempt to discuss Sontag’s argument in relation to the documentary film Night and Fog. Night and Fog by Alain Resnais Night and Fog uses a French storyteller alongside contemporary perspectives and archival film recordings of the concentration camps. The documentary film also hosts several still photographs (Knobler 2008). A major issue explored in the film is the opposition between the desolated, wretched camps at present and the different atrocities they witnessed in the 1940s. A secondary issue is the manner in which the atrocious Nazis were not inherently distinct from other human beings in most cases. The documentary film is sketchy, and not strictly sequential. It opens up with vivid footages of present-day camp sites, a harmless environment populated with rubbles, abandoned buildings, and wild flowers. An unforgettable episode at the onset displays how the entry to the concentration camp looked like to a World captive (Aufderheide 2007). With a measured narrative style, the initial part of the film progresses from the first instances of Nazi power to arrest all over Europe, and the appalling realities of camp existence. Sprinkled with gruesome images from the 1940s are several photographs of present-day camps. They look like threadbare artefacts of a historic period. The last part of the documentary film emphasises the concentration camps as places of inhumane events and mass slaughter. Himmler then appears to readdress the intention of the concentration camps (Shandler 1999). The horrendous images of mass extermination are documented and shown in various ways: containers loaded with victims’ heads, partially incinerated remains in funeral pyres, and signs of struggles and pain on the inner entrails of the gas chambers. A haunting aerial photograph of a concentration camp in the 1940s confers a ghostly feeling of the immensity of the whole venture (Aufderheide 2007). The documentary film ends with images of the concentration camps being freed, and the perpetrators facing legal proceedings. The narrator afterwards informs the audience that this kind of inhumane desires and actions persist until now. Night and Fog fuses a controlled narrative style with memorable vivid photographs and scenes. Transitioning from archival footage to the current condition of these places of dread is remarkably successful. However, in spite of its power and influence, the documentary film raises a number of dilemmas. The general premise that resulted in the concentration camps is overlooked. Hence, the act of genocide presents a more methodical, but never an exceptional, concern for this subject matter. Susan Sontag, on a similar vein, sees this whole enterprise in a more reflective and scholarly way. Looking at Night and Fog through Susan Sontag’s Arguments It is the argument of this paper that there will always be a moment in the existence of a civilisation which will endure a tremendous predicament, where in there emerges a discourse of traumatic memory. The relevance of Susan Sontag’s argument to Night and Fog overcomes the factual allusion to specific experience of horror or explicit dread, and rests, instead, in films, in the expressions of a variety of media, of a domain shared by all these shocking experiences. One could be shocked or devastated by an experience with the Holocaust, one could be incapable of taking in an image or a recollection of mass slaughter, but the discourse of traumatic memory, as an audience experiences it in the Night and Fog, offers one an expression with which to try to embody the inaccuracies of representation or depiction that one has encountered. When vivid illustrations of mass extermination in Night and Fog appear, it immediately necessitated quite modest storytelling support so as to generate sensational trauma. The archival footages would be sufficient for the Holocaust to be represented in the film, to be recognised in a historical perspective, and to be validated. In the second part of the film, nevertheless, when the photographs and scenes themselves fail to traumatize anymore, the representation at this moment, should work further. According to Susan Sontag (2003), documentary representations should be surrendered to a narrative discourse whose objective is at least to generate a post-traumatic historical awareness, and not merely literal trauma. This post-traumatic historical awareness is a form of documentary conciliation between the absurdity of the first traumatic experience and the meaningful mechanism of a completely consolidated historical narrative. The ensuing representation of Night and Fog officially reiterates the trauma of the initial experiences with inhumane acts, both the first-hand eyewitnesses of the horrendous events and the consequent cinematic experience with the depiction of the massacre. As traumatic memory is less a specific observed content than an experiential kind, hence the discourse of traumatic memory in the Night and Fog is marked less by a specific photographic content than by the effort to unravel a style for embodying that content which imitates some features of trauma itself—the effort to reiterate for the audience an experience of swiftly witnessing the unimaginable anew. However, it is still questionable whether the determined representation of the Holocaust in the Night and Fog is in itself a remedy to the toxins it survives on. Whatever rewards the film claim to offer for the appalling images it embodies should be interpreted in light of arguments that art reiterates instead of eradicate the corruptions it chooses for its theme or, unfortunately, trivialises or belittles them in general. What Susan Sontag (1979) argues regarding representation or photography could incriminate the carefree application of image as well, or, more specifically, by including facts to photography, it compromises moral aspects for fascinating impacts and in fact alienates the audience rather than setting fire to his/her conscience. If Alain Resnais tried to validate criminalising violent power by representing the common medium of the general law, how does Night and Fog embody the exercise of court trial of concentration camps? It has been already argued by Susan Sontag that the accounts of the prosecution that the images or photographs ‘express themselves,’ whilst conceivably valuable in rationalising the opening of the documentary film as an eyewitness, intimidated to disturb as well any attempt to resolve the furies embodied on film with Resnais’s interpretation of the camp experiences. Certainly, for Sontag’s theory to be reliable, Resnais’s had to sustain precisely what the concentration camps blatantly violated by showing archival footages. To represent concentration camps at present inopportunely presents a flawed concept of what the camp sites witnessed more than five decades ago. The atrocity witnessed in concentration camps is quite well-known at present that it is hard to envisage an original film, specifically, a film that disturbs not merely because of the savageness of the images, but because of its uniqueness as well. Nevertheless, this does not imply that the actual scenes and photographs in Night and Fog set off the similar visual understanding of, for instance, the documentary film about the assassination of Kennedy (Bourguignon 2005), albeit the images of British troops amassing tons of mutilated remains of Holocaust victims are definitely still among the most haunting and familiar archival footage of Resnais’s masterpiece. Instead, this implies that the filmic environment of today is largely the visual heritage of movies like Night and Fog, a cultural domain characterised by the creation and depiction of vivid images of atrocious acts. Apparently, according to Susan Sontag (2003), the film had unearthed the power of World War I. However these films, like Night and Fog, seldom demonstrated vivid photographs of the war casualties. In fact, due to the technological weaknesses of photography in the early 20th century, the most interesting and arresting images to drip out of the First World War were documented ones (Zelizer 1998). For instance, photography of the Civil War by Mathew Brady had illustrated the particular connection between casualty and photography: how the silence and stillness of the photograph illustrates relationship with the restfulness of death (Bourguignon 2005). However by bringing the filmic landscape into a novel and, at the moment, strange territory of horror and brutality, Resnais’s Night and Fog did less to broaden the bequest of Brady than to give justice to it. Discussion and Conclusions Hence, the question is how to appropriately represent atrocities and their aftermath in films? The Holocaust is frequently taken advantage by people who have easy access to the mass media. The sole renditions of Nazi atrocities that we witness in movies are the handful that have been authorised for public showing, and usually this is less an issue of reason, quality, or preference than of opportunity: the for-profit intentions of the current filmic landscape make it a doubtful means to convey and unravel the truth of the Second World War, due to the heavy reliance on slapsticks, irrational plot, morbidity, sex, and others. However, it is mainly though films that the public is informed of, and will continue to be informed of, the Holocaust victims and their experiences. Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog is undoubtedly shocking and deeply moving for large numbers of audiences, for it is usually their initial experience with the blatant scenes and photography of the Nazi concentration camps. Although there is a large-scale ongoing attempt to preserve historical documents, there has traditionally been a powerful thrust toward disregarding or forgetting, even smothering, memories of the Holocaust. The topic was practically prohibited for several years. In his work Prisoners of Silence: A Vicarious Holocaust Memory, Climo (1995) reveals that, when he discovered an open Holocaust memorial ceremony, “I was overcome with powerful feelings of emotional pain... as if some secret of my own past had been revealed by a stranger, without my knowledge or consent...! I didn’t have a clue about their source” (as cited in Bourguignon 2005, 63). Climo, for a fact, is not a first-hand eyewitness or survivor of the Holocaust. Yet he had built an explicit recollection and identity concerning the Holocaust, in his relationship with actual concentration camp survivors. Looking at these experiences with remarkable compassion, Climo states that these survivors of atrocities articulate little of their frightening experiences (Bourguignon 2005). However they passed their stories on in a variety of indirect ways, in order for the younger generation to bear in mind the identity of these survivors, to internalise their experiences (Bourguignon 2005) as their own. Is there a legendary account in Night and Fog rooted in the Holocaust experience? This would definitely demand a more thorough analysis and it possibly will be quite premature to embark on such an endeavour. Nevertheless, there are components of legendary history to be discerned, and conceivably audiences can see their political allusions. The components that appear do not build a reliable, logical picture. According to Susan Sontag (2003), in her analysis of Holocaust films, there are numerous experiences, enlightened by diverse points of view, but all are manifestations of the necessity to understand the events. For general and individual justifications, it is vital not to hold back the Holocaust memory but rather to recognise, to make sense of, and to deal with it. Films, like Night and Fog, not merely furnish meaning to unthinkable events and experiences; they also aid people in estranging themselves from these harrowing memories and provide the opportunity to create new lives and move on. History and memories have outcomes. The generation of today tries to look for and unearth the realities that have been buried. Forgetting is distancing, reluctance to face reality. Overlooking and refuting the past creates foolishness. But the commercial representation of the Nazi atrocities may have serious repercussions, for survivors and for people who view their identities as part of the Holocaust experience. References Aufderheide, P. (2007) Documentary film: A very short introduction. UK: Oxford University Press. Barnouw,E. (1993) Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. UK: Oxford University Press.  Bourguignon, E. (2005) “Memory in an Amnesic World: Holocaust, Exile, and the Return of the Suppressed” Anthropological Quarterly 78(1), 63+ Knobler,J. (2008) Photography, Politics and the Holocaust 1920- 1950. Hostra University Library.   Shandler, J. (1999) While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press. Sontag,S. (1979) On photography. Penguin Books.  Sontag,S (2003) Regarding the pain of the others. Penguin Books.  Zelizer,B. (1998) Remembering to forget: Holocaust memory through the camera's eye. University Chicago press.  Read More