The images of atrocity, either analog or digital, are always the trace of an encounter between the gaze of a photographer or a cameraman and a human being suffering from the painful effects of man-made violence. The archive images resulting from such an encounter raise some inevitable questions: who took them and for what purpose? Is it possible to retrace the process that led to these shots? What do they hide behind what the eye can see? Owing to their defective nature and the changes they have endured throughout history, these images strongly contribute to shape collective memory by becoming real sites of memory for ethnic or national communities. Therefore, the archive of human pain, encompassing a wide range of public spaces – such as museums, monuments, artworks, memorials, human rights associations and so on – is a reservoir of images to stimulate grief or fuel action for social change. This introduction has two main aims: on the one hand, it investigates the circulation of such images within the visual sphere and their social or political uses; on the other hand, it provides the paths of research and the new findings extensively analysed in the contributions included in this volume.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Questioning the Images of Atrocity: An Introduction
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Introduction
2015-03-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Vicente Sánchez-Biosca
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Universitat de València
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Questioning the Images of Atrocity: An Introduction
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Questioning the Images of Atrocity: An Introduction
Alice Cati, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, Universitat de València




Abstract

   The images of atrocity, either analog or digital, are always the trace of an encoun-
   ter between the gaze of a photographer or a cameraman and a human being suf-
   fering from the painful effects of man-made violence. The archive images result-
   ing from such an encounter raise some inevitable questions: who took them and
   for what purpose? Is it possible to retrace the process that led to these shots?
   What do they hide behind what the eye can see? Owing to their defective nature
   and the changes they have endured throughout history, these images strongly
   contribute to shape collective memory by becoming real sites of memory for
   ethnic or national communities. Therefore, the archive of human pain, encom-
   passing a wide range of public spaces – such as museums, monuments, artworks,
   memorials, human rights associations and so on – is a reservoir of images to
   stimulate grief or fuel action for social change. This introduction has two main
   aims: on the one hand, it investigates the circulation of such images within the
   visual sphere and their social or political uses; on the other hand, it provides the
   paths of research and the new findings extensively analysed in the contributions
   included in this volume.


   The images of atrocity, either photochemical or digital, are always the trace
of an encounter between the gaze of the holder of any visual registering de-
vice, and a human being suffering from the effect of natural catastrophes or
man-made violence. In these painful representations, two gazes are presumed to
share a brief instant, even though as sometimes happens they fail to meet. Then
the instant frozen by the frame dramatically poses the major questions that se-
miologues, philosophers and intellectuals have considered since the 1930s as
the essence of photography, namely: its status as a trace and the fatal certitude
that we consume it once the intense feeling of presentness has already past. This
is of course not the place to insist on these well known theses that range from
Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes, from Philippe Dubois to Susan Sontag,
and other prominent names that constitute the canon of photography studies.
Nonetheless, we may wonder if, at least in its extreme manifestations, as in the

                                                  Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 24, Spring 2015
                            Alice Cati and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca


subgenre of images of impending death, it is reasonable to establish a solid his-
torical background rather than work in the realm of general principles.1 It seems
paradoxical to claim that the hic et nunc is the defining point of photography
and neglect immediately afterwards the analysis of the precise circumstances in
which a photograph has been produced. We do not question the pertinence of
the classical definitions of photography, but to articulate them with the frame-
work in which each one of them originated. As John Tagg put it in a canonical
essay, The Burden of Representation, we need “not an alchemy but a history,
outside which the existential essence of photography is empty…”2
    In reality, the vast consumption of this genre of images both in old and new
media inevitably triggered a torrent of questions that are as hard to avoid as dif-
ficult to fully answer. Some of them concern the close analysis of the form and
content of such visual products: frame, camera angle, static or dynamic composi-
tion, texture and quality etc., while others affect their modality, that is, the gaze
with which the camera holder addressed the object of affliction as he or she captured
it. However uncertain this second aspect may be, it should be interrogated from
the images themselves, since the political, ethical or human perspective adopted
towards a theme is indelibly inscribed (but sometimes concealed) in the image
itself. Consequently, instead of considering the attitude from a psychological or
ideological point of view, we argue that the images contain and, to a greater or
lesser degree, make explicit the intention with which they were engendered. This
having been established, the analysis of their ‘modality’ cannot be reduced to
textual aspects, but is constrained to taking into consideration the circumstances
in which the apparatus registered the human suffering or its effects. Therefore,
the historian seeking a response has to interrogate both aspects (textual and con-
textual) that are inextricably linked. Some of these questions may be: who took
them and with what purpose? Is it possible to retrace the evolving of the events
captured, their precedents and consequences that escape their recording? What
do they hide beyond the limits of their scope, either placed off-screen or even
and more precisely in the reverse-shot? What is the precise instant captured by
the photograph in the longer sequence from which this fragment has been re-
trieved? Space and time are, as we realize, involved in our questioning.
    The kind of issues raised by the enunciation of atrocity images may be de-
duced from the vast arsenal originated in World War II and its aftermath, the
Shoah. In such a corpus the so-called liberator images can be opposed to others,
which, according to Marianne Hirsch, could be termed perpetrator images.3 The
former group is represented by the photographs or footage taken by profession-


1
  Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Oxford University Press,
Oxford-New York 2010.
2
  John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays in Photographies and Histories, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1993, p. 3.
3
  Marianne Hirsch in different places. See Id., The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual
Culture after the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, New York 2012.

10
                  Questioning the Images of Atrocity: An Introduction


als attached to the Red Army on their arrival in Majdanek or by the military-at-
tached photographers and filmmakers or freelancers who entered Bergen Belsen
or Buchenwald, respectively with the Brits or with the Americans. Consciously
or unconsciously, all of them were bearing witness to events that had occurred
out of the reach of the cameras. In this sense, these shots provide a window
through which we contemplate the effects of the atrocities committed by the
Germans by means of a rhetorical figure, metonymy, which consists of infer-
ring the deed (the mass murder) by showing its effects (the emaciated bodies
and corpses, the mass graves, the human experiments made by the Nazis etc.).
Inasmuch as the recordings were intended for memory and education (a sort of
‘pedagogy by horror’), technical choices were implemented to make the vision
plausible for the target viewers. Among these visual strategies we might cite the
co-presence of reporters (usually in the foreground) and carnage (in the back-
ground), the refusal to use montage, the preference for synchronous sound and
especially witnesses’ voices giving credit to what they have encountered...
   As far as the perpetrator images are concerned, the Germans took photographs
and filmed in the course of their campaigns in the Eastern front. Historians have
even documented how Wehrmacht units and Einsatzgruppen consumed those im-
ages when operating in Russia. We would like to briefly mention a particular case.
   In May 1942, a propaganda team disembarked in the Warsaw ghetto with the
purpose of filming both staged scenes and improvised street views. The footage
falls unequivocally into the above-mentioned category since its authors, sent by
the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, were part of the machinery
of destruction. It would suffice to recall that running in parallel to the filming the
SS were implementing the last details to the extermination camp of Treblinka,
which was soon to become the destination of a considerable number of the
ghetto inhabitants. The immortalization of the Eastern Jew through the image
was connected with the project of his material destruction. Two months later, on
22 July 1942, the major deportations from the ghetto started. However, a hasty
interpretation of this link must be eschewed, given the gaps between the murder
and the production of the image. In this sense, the historian has to take into
account the personal, spatial and temporal discrepancies between the act of killing
and the act of filming. Neither the protagonists of the shooting nor the filmed
victims were to coincide exactly with the protagonists of the annihilation, not to
mention the time-lapse and the distance between the two scenes. Accordingly, far
from being a phrase that excludes further explanation, the concept of perpetrator
image demands an accurate scrutiny of the specific circumstances surrounding
both the Warsaw filming and the Warsaw deportation. The work of the historian
must go deeper in the specificities.
   Yet, if the production of atrocity images raises such delicate issues and de-
mands descending to the ground to examine the details, the analysis of their
circulation increases the variants and difficulties. The social meaning of each im-
age changes inevitably as it is incorporated into different chains of discourse, and
nowadays this process has achieved an unprecedented relevance. More precisely,

                                                                                   11
                             Alice Cati and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca


meaning changes, first, when moving in the diachronic level, across time, under
the form of appropriation, citation, re-editing, inversion, perversion, and so on;
second, while these images migrate in the synchronic level, moving through the
increasingly complex media system, from photography to cinema, from television
to social networks, not to mention installations and museum or commemoration
spaces. In other words, instead of remaining static, these images are extremely
instable and rich in meaning and malleability. From propaganda to counter-
propaganda, from exemplary purposes to memory effects, from denunciation
aims to artistic redemption, the circulation, remediation and instability of the
enunciation in which they appear prove that repetition always implies difference.
   Yet, another aspect that these images have to face is their capacity of repre-
senting trauma. In the most recent years a new interest in Trauma Studies and
Memory Studies has risen among scholars and the broader intellectual com-
munity alike. This new concern, which is undeniably shaped and inspired by a
multifaceted range of sociocultural, geopolitical and historical developments, is
twofold. On the one hand, it shows the increased relevance of social practices
provided by institutions, such as archives, museums, memorials, web sites, instal-
lations, media products focused on the cultural specificity of wars, conflicts and
instances of massacre, torture, and genocide. On the other hand, it encourages
the in-depth examination of the concept of trauma – in the light of the effects
in the “traumatized communities” – which has led to the acknowledgment of its
importance within the interdisciplinary contemporary thought.
   This special issue of Cinéma & Cie has placed greater emphasis on the cen-
trality of human suffering in terms of private and shared experiences. Due to
the pervasiveness of mass media, many conflicts occurring in the last decades
have been witnessed and represented by means of photographic and filmic
devices whose products circulate in different contexts and media outlets to-
day. As a result, the essays in this journal deal with the issues of the politics of
memory and mourning as well as the collective abuses consigned to oblivion
and the annihilation of the past. The images of these traumatic events offer a
specific opportunity to explore the strategies which societies have developed
to represent themselves at national and international level. Therefore, crucial
to this is the variety of media representations and cultural embodiments of hu-
man pain. By adopting a dynamic multidisciplinary approach and focusing on
different case studies, the articles collected here complement each other and
deal productively with works and critical frameworks borrowed from other
disciplines and fields of research.
   The main question that this collection of articles takes into account concerns
– in Huyssen’s words – the “universal trope for historical trauma,”4 that is to say
the Shoah as the icon of pain and suffering, by which other instances of geno-


4
 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford University
Press, Stanford 2003, pp. 13-14. See also Geoffrey H. Hartman, Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes
of Memory, Blackwell, Cambridge (MA) 1994.

12
                      Questioning the Images of Atrocity: An Introduction


cide and horror are measured. By showing different aspects and effects of the
mediatization of traumatic experiences in Western societies, several essays are
concerned with the dark shadow of the Nazi Regime and the Holocaust.
    In Barbara Grespi’s essay, the concept of the ornamental and anaesthetic gaze
– borrowed by Siegfrid Kracauer and Ernst Jünger – is introduced in order to
examine the German postwar iconography. Exploiting literature, literary criti-
cism, media archaeology and film studies, the article proposes an analysis of the
terrifying representation of the German cities, completely devastated by air raids
and reduced to rubble. Insightfully connecting the filmic representations of ruins
in Trümmerfilm with the images of damaged marble statues, X-ray pictures of
human skeletons, and, finally, aerial shots previously taken by the Nazis during
the War and by the Allies afterwards, the author illustrates the ways in which
trauma is represented more or less explicitly in German cinema and photogra-
phy. Grespi particularly notices how the motifs of mineralization, mutilation of
the body and transcription of the landscape or human figure into abstract signs
correspond to the unconscious “affectless reaction” of the German people –
consisting in considering themselves as victims of a catastrophe – along with
their desire to forget the other German actions carried out during World War II.
    Within the same, well-known theoretical framework regarding the represent-
ability or non-representability of the Holocaust, a fil-rouge can be traced between
the Postwar iconography and the contemporary figurations and patterns applied
to the Shoah as a master narrative5 Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann’s contribution pro-
vides a nuanced understanding of the creation of a fixed iconography and its reiter-
ated use by which both the popular culture and the current mediated memory are
deeply shaped. Bearing in mind the significant critical debate about the different
stylistic and aesthetic strategies used by Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and Ste-
ven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), the essay draws parallels and finds connec-
tions among three mainstream fiction movies – X-Men, The Pianist, and Everything
is Illuminated – in order to problematize the notion of cinematic archives. Follow-
ing Genette’s theory of transtextuality and Derrida’s concept of archive, the author
shows how fiction films assemble stereotypical images from archives (e.g. pictures
of concentration camps), and use them as a model for cinematic productions aim-
ing to create a repertoire of ready-made and recyclable imagery.
    If in feature films the archive of human pain is made of copies of other images
(“images of images”), which have definitely lost their referential address to the
past, the use or reuse of proper archival images leads to the central reflection on
the relationship between history and filmic devices. Taking Jem Cohen’s essay


5
 According to Jeffrey J. Alexander, the representation of trauma depends on creating a convincing
description of the traumatic event and its effects on the individual as well as the collective level.
Moreover, four representations are necessary to construct a new master narrative: the nature of the
pain, the nature of the victim, the relation of the trauma victim with the wider audience, the attri-
bution of responsability, Jeffrey J. Alexander in Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma, in Id. et al.,
Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, University of California Press, Berkeley 2004, pp. 12-15.

                                                                                                  13
                           Alice Cati and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca


films – Buried in Light (1994), and Empire of Tin (2007-2008) – as an effective
case study and a key example of an anachronic approach to historical temporal-
ity, Maria Teresa Soldani considers images as multilayered temporal phenomena,
fragments of time within which present, past, and future coexist. Particularly
inspired by Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, in Buried in Light, Cohen
first explores the connection between private memory – based on his own travel
experiences in Central Eastern Europe and his family’s origins – and collective
memory – shocked by the Shoah. This historical trauma is perceived as an irre-
versible rupture whose traces (i. e. archival material of Jewish persecution on the
streets) are still present as contemporary geographical landmarks (symbolically
represented by Auschwitz today) in spite of any impulse to forget. Later on by
focusing on the discrepancy between the cyclic-progressive nature of the history
of capitalism and the non-positivistic idea of “archive of pain,” in Empire of Tin
the collage of past and present documentary images (e.g. WWI and Ground
Zero) as well as manipulated images of contemporary politicians aims to produce
a collision or a collapse, in order to reveal hidden truths and stop catastrophes
from being repeated again. Undoubtedly, such a dialectical way of thinking his-
tory and the history of images itself specifically engage with broad theoretical is-
sues around the use and re-contextualization of visual traces of human suffering.
Moreover, it is clear that the memory of the Holocaust can be seen as a transcul-
tural and transhistorical device6 because it has deeply affected the ways in which
societies conceive and represent the political tragedy itself, including the most
recent one: from the Argentinean Dirty War to the Rwandan Genocide, from the
Bosnian war to the 9/11 attacks, just to mention a few of them.
   Another area of consideration highlighted in this special issue of Cinéma &
Cie regards the inadequacy of the visual archives to give full account of the past.
Offering an in-depth analysis of Gerhard Richter’s work 18.Oktober 1977 (1988),
based on the photographs of moments in the lives and the tragic and suspicious
deaths of four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) during their imprison-
ment in Stuttgart, Luisella Farinotti highlights that the paintings cycle not only
invites the observer to reflect upon the emerging unconscious fear of totalitari-
anism and state violence in Germany during the Seventies, but it also suggests
that inside any documentary source, something remains ungraspable and unde-
cipherable. Through the aesthetic choice of recycling, blurring and graining the
pictures of the Baader-Meinhof Group’s corpses, previously shot by the police
and published in a weekly magazine, Richter transforms such images, which have
imprinted themselves on the collective memory as obscene “crime scenes,” into
a Pathosformel,7 an iconic formula of death and victimhood. By showing the hu-


6
  See Angela H. Gutchess, Maya Sieglel, Memory Specifity Across Cultures, in Aleida Assmann,
Linda Shortt (eds.), Memory and Political Change, Palgrave Macmillan, London-New York 2012,
pp. 201-215.
7
  Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantôme selon Aby
Warburg, Editions de Minuit, Paris 2002.

14
                    Questioning the Images of Atrocity: An Introduction


man vulnerability of the dead terrorists – as the author argues – the artistic act of
rewriting the pictures aims to restore the traumatic memory linked to an event
that needs to be seen as it is, far from any political mystifications.
   The idea that memory – even in its visual form – always deals with something
that is lost, erased, or maybe never existed because no image has been produced
to document harrowing scenes of human annihilation, is at the core of Sylvie
Rollet’s contribution. By analyzing two films, The Missing Picture (2013) by Rithy
Panh and Công Binh, la longue nuit indochinoise (2013) by Lâm Lê, the author
introduces the well-known concept of “missing image,” considering not only the
presence/absence dialectic, which represents the essence of the image, but also
trying to find out what can be understood by the means of the image. In both
films, the spectator is involved in an interesting hermeneutic work by mentally
combining archive footages originally made to celebrate the totalitarian legacy
(Khmer Rouge on the one hand, and colonial imperialism in Indochina, on the
other) with oral testimonies, clay figures or traditional water puppets that help
to explain and recreate the atrocities of the past. Such an intermedia strategy8
tells the viewer how limited the moving images capacity of showing is, and it
underlines that the real place to unveil the truth of the past dwells in the visual
variance, that is to say the reverse-shot that can just be imagined.
   As it can be noticed in the abovementioned essays, this special issue draws
the attention to the historical evolution of the meaning and social practice in-
herent in an image, from its production to its most current uses. In particular,
Alice Cati and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca engage with the presentness of the past,
adopted as the starting point and the point of view itself from which the archi-
val image should be examined and studied in order to deconstruct potentially
aberrant decodings. Through the analysis of some significant works (Marcelo
Brodsky’s Buena Memoria, 1997, Gustavo Germano’s Ausenc’as, 2006, Silvio
Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuelto, 1998, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz -2012)
concerning the politics of disappearance in Argentina and Chile, Cati works
on some desaparecidos’ family pictures, symbolically and socially perceived as
the last relics of the vanished bodies. While the artistic re-contextualization of
private images becomes a sort of burial gesture and a restorative act of memory,
it cannot be overlooked that the denial of public grief at the present time influ-
ences the interpretation of the pictures as representations of victimhood. Thus,
as the author of the essay suggests, when the peaceful, ordinary everyday life
turns into the representation of a tragic destiny, a “backshadowing” herme-
neutic device comes into play. The challenge for the contemporary cultural and
media response does not lie in pathologizing the victim’s hopes, but in acknowl-
edging that they had a future before the tragedy occurred.
   The photographic act, that is to say the original gesture witnessed/immortal-
ized in the picture, is also the core of Sánchez-Biosca’s article. By looking back

8
  Pietro Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale. Perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo
visibile, Laterza, Bari 2010.

                                                                                           15
                         Alice Cati and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca


at the history of Tuol Sleng’s photos, which were taken because it was imposed
by the bureaucratic procedures of Khmer Rouge regime, the author argues that
in the aftermath the reception of the pictures, influenced by different contexts
(archives, museums, art galleries, films, editorial projects, legal scenes etc.), has
transformed the social perception of the represented people from guilty sub-
jects into innocent victims. According to the main theoretical references to the
indexical nature of the analog image and visual memory as a performative act,
the analysis goes beyond the re-mediation of an archive of human pain as a
cultural phenomenon, in that it prominently shows the achievement of both a
political and institutional scopic regime which affects the pictures within any
cultural framework. Like a set of Chinese boxes, the Tuol Sleng archive has
been scanned by heterogeneous gazes, in a never ending and transformative
flow that is able to redefine the violent power of the images as well as the present
in order to remove the oblivion of the genocide.
   In conclusion, Archives in Human Pain does not aim to give an answer to all the
questions from the past and recent debate about cultural trauma, media and pain-
ful heritage. However, we hope that the interdisciplinary approach adopted and
proposed in these essays will open new research paths that can contribute to the
studies about the relationship between difficult memory and images worldwide.




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