Documentary Films Have Played an Important Part in Determining the Way We Construct History and Memory. in What Ways Do Documentary Films Dealing with the Holocaust Determine Contemporary Understandings of That Historical Event?
Documentary films and their representations of the Holocaust have served not only to speak their truth' of the atrocities but also to document changing paradigms of social thought concerning Holocaust truth'.
Holocaust History and its documentation:
Theodor Adorno's famous 1949 injunction that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' is indicative of the initial approaches of documentary to the subject matter.
The first documentary footage of the Holocaust was shot as Allied troops entered the camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, but this footage was archived by British Ministry of Information, wary of the political and social repercussions of such explicit imagery in a war-torn and divided Germany. These censorious tendencies, leading to what is often phrased as a voluntary and collective social amnesia' have traditionally followed such culturally cataclysmic events as the Holocaust. As Todorov examines in his seminal work Facing the Extreme this cultural will to erase serves to deepen the wounds. By only allowing literal understandings of the history, and ignoring the exemplary and processed history we disseminate the consequences of the initial trauma over all the moments of existence.' Subsequently both historians and documentarians have sought to redress errors and point out lacunae in the constructed narrative of the Holocaust, producing a new knowledge of history and its rhetoric . Documentary film, initially, as the self-proclaimed harbinger of historical truth', has sought to reactivate' and analyse the events of the Holocaust in modally divergent ways. The development of the documentary form, however, its divergence from connoting completeness and increasing interest in displaying historical subjectivity and contradiction, signposts for the contemporary audience not only changing attitudes towards documentary but also towards the Holocaust. From initial shock, greater acceptance of the Jewish persecution, and eventual understanding
Holocaust History and its documentation:
Theodor Adorno's famous 1949 injunction that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' is indicative of the initial approaches of documentary to the subject matter.
The first documentary footage of the Holocaust was shot as Allied troops entered the camps of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, but this footage was archived by British Ministry of Information, wary of the political and social repercussions of such explicit imagery in a war-torn and divided Germany. These censorious tendencies, leading to what is often phrased as a voluntary and collective social amnesia' have traditionally followed such culturally cataclysmic events as the Holocaust. As Todorov examines in his seminal work Facing the Extreme this cultural will to erase serves to deepen the wounds. By only allowing literal understandings of the history, and ignoring the exemplary and processed history we disseminate the consequences of the initial trauma over all the moments of existence.' Subsequently both historians and documentarians have sought to redress errors and point out lacunae in the constructed narrative of the Holocaust, producing a new knowledge of history and its rhetoric . Documentary film, initially, as the self-proclaimed harbinger of historical truth', has sought to reactivate' and analyse the events of the Holocaust in modally divergent ways. The development of the documentary form, however, its divergence from connoting completeness and increasing interest in displaying historical subjectivity and contradiction, signposts for the contemporary audience not only changing attitudes towards documentary but also towards the Holocaust. From initial shock, greater acceptance of the Jewish persecution, and eventual understanding
Bibliography: Armes, Roy The Cinema of Alain Resnais, London: A. Zwemmer Limited, 1968 Bruzzi, Stella Contemporary Documentary: A Critical Introduction, Routledge 2000 Gubar, Susan Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. Jewish Literature and Culture Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003 Hoberman, Jim, "Schindler 's List: Myth, Movie and Memory," Village Voice 39, no 1994 LaCapra, Dominick History and Memory After Auschwitz, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998 Rabinowitz, Paula Wreckage Upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory in History and Theory; Vol. 32, Issue 2, 1993 Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation Williams, Linda "Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History and The Thin Blue Line" in Barry Keith Grant & Jeanette Sloniowski (eds), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video Wayne State UP, Detroit, 1998