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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Sylvie LindepergLa Voie des images. Quatre histoires de tournage au printemps-été 1944 Verdier, Paris 2013, pp. 288
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2015-03-01
2021-09-21
2015-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Martina Panelli
2015/03/01
Università degli Studi di Udine
2036-461X
24
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Sylvie LindepergLa Voie des images. Quatre histoires de tournage au printemps-été 1944 Verdier, Paris 2013, pp. 288
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16418/17050
15
                             Reviews / Comptes-rendus


Sylvie Lindeperg
La Voie des images.
Quatre histoires de tournage au printemps-été 1944
Verdier, Paris 2013, pp. 288




   To Sylvie Lindeperg, a historian who specialises in the Second World War,
to follow La Voie des images is an imperative that begins with Les Écrans de
l’ombre, the first outcome of a research that aims to ascertain the awkward link
between the recording of an event and the multiplicity of points of view that
establish the processes of its reception and therefore of its historical, symbolic
and memorializing re-actualisation.
   La Voie des images has a similar purpose, even though it moves from a differ-
ent starting point: its ‘path’ opens up to the present, then identifies the book’s
vanishing point in four films shot in 1944 by partisans from the Vercors Forest
or occupied Paris, or even by people internalised in the concentration camps
in Terezin (Poland) and in Westerbork (Netherlands). Lindeperg’s analysis of
these fragments is anticipated by the observation of the “uniformisation crois-
sante des formes d’écriture de l’histoire” made today for the general public.
Films (La Rafle), TV series (Apocalypse) or docu-fictions (Auschwitz: les nazis
et la solution finale and La Resistance) challenge the scholar to recognise the
drift that characterises the intensive exploitation of the archives and images
and finally icons of recent history.
   In the first chapter, “Les tyrannies du visible,” Lindeperg sums the elements
up to justify her statement. History (a juicy and marketable topic) is today manip-
ulated and transformed into a sort of “digestible object.” Thanks to the newest
digital processing, restoration and editing technologies and thanks to a renewed
accessibility to archives, producers and filmmakers and technicians are involved
in procedures that mix up times, lengths and models of vision, encouraging an
aesthetic of the overabundant, of the hyper-visible, of a history free from uncer-
tainties or errors that speculates on its knowledge and transmission.
   So it goes in La Resistance, where the filmmaker Christophe Nick indiffer-
ently uses so much fictional images (as Guy Moquet’s killing scene, shot by
René Clement in La Bataille du rail in 1945) and archive footage (related to the
Parisian Resistance) that he can mix them up and level them out. Similarly in
Apocalypse each archival footage (originally in black and white) is re-coloured,
re-framed and post-synched to take in the temporal distance, which separates
today’s spectators from the original footage’s aesthetic rules. In this way, what
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                         Sylvie Lindeperg, La Voie des Images


Lindeperg calls the hors champ of History is filled up with a champ plein “un
espace recrée où le spectateur-visiteur se déplace comme il le ferait dans un jeu
vidéo” (p. 30). To counterbalance this tendency, Lindeperg suggests an alterna-
tive methodology. It consists in opposing “la lenteur persistante et obstinée d’un
commerce renouvelé avec les images de cinéma” (p. 15) to this contemporary
saturation and speed of circulation that does not let the archive live and happen.
Lindperg uses two methods in her survey: first is the return to the fragment to
study the image in its singular epiphany. Like cutting off the sequences of the
French Resistance or those shot in Westerbork or Terezin, from the context
that has “appauvries [theses sequences] par l’usage […], transformées en lieux
communs et en icones marchandises” (p. 10) she studies the images in a patient
and close way to let vibrate, in their sensible presence, the fragile and imperfect
traces of the spectres that are hidden within. Examining the archive seems to
mean implicitly a need for a freeze, a still produced in reading to re-evaluate the
role of the imagination in the historical reconstruction process. This attitude
allows a form of not-reconciled survivance of the images, and in this sense it
establishes the truly temporal dimension of the archive.
   The study of Anna Maria ‘Settela’ Steinbach, laic icon (Susan Sontag) of the
horror of the extermination, is a clear example of this process: in 1944 Jewish
photographer Robert Breslauer framed her face leaning out from a train from
Westerbork to Auschwitz. As the only close-up of the film ordered by the Na-
zis to the photographer, this very frame seems to accomplish itself in a quest
for an “instant aussi bref qu’interminable” (p. 187), so symbolic to contain all
the meaning of the tragedy. If on one hand Breslauer seems to push inside the
image that which he was otherwise prevented from stating, on the other hand
Lindeperg, by following the trajectory of that very gaze, reproduces, as in slow
motion, that short ralenti, that decisive instant in which the look of the filmmaker
and the look of the young woman meet.
   If on one hand then, by privileging these details, the author’s method seems to
eliminate the hors champ of the film, on the other hand this same method is nour-
ished by a constant consideration of its production/reception context, as if the
analysis were moved by a double trend which permits us to confute the perceptible
evidence of what is shown in the light of an accurate documentary reconstruction.
   To remain further on the Westerbork footage case, we can therefore retrace
the various phases of its readings, uses, and rewritings to Harun Farocki’s crucial
ready-made work on Breslauer’s footage titled Respite/Sursis. The chapter that, in
Lindeperg’s book, introduces these kinds of reflections, “Le double jeu du cin-
ema,” leads us to follow the questions that open the volume further: how can we
illustrate History? How can we re-open the perspective of its possible readings
instead of closing or saturating them?
   It is actually by putting in contact these two kinds of work that we would like
to take into account the value of her text in the wider frame of a contemporary
debate on the archive and on the ethics of its preservation and re-use.
   Georges Didi-Huberman, in a main oeuvre entitled Remontage du temps subi,

                                                                                167
                              Reviews / Comptes-rendus


dwelt on the archival work promoted by the German artist Farocki. One of the
formulae employed by the scholar to describe Farocki’s critical, political and cre-
ative engagement seems to us an appropriate return to what also characterises
Lindeperg’s engagement in La Voie des images: “L’artiste-archéologue n’est pas du
tout un nostalgique replié sur le passé : il ouvre les temps par son effort constant
de transmission, ce qu’on appelle si bien, en français, un ‘passage de témoin.’ Et
c’est en ce sens qu’il nous reprend par la main en nous ouvrant les yeux” (p. 108).
   By inviting us to re-confer to the images their initiative and suggesting to us
to read them closely as if we were struck by them, but also able to respect the
rigour of their eluding mystery, Lindeperg succeeds in keeping History’s vanish-
ing point wide open. While carrying us by [her] hands (as Didi-Huberman puts
it), she re-opens our eyes in order to transmit to us a knowledge that tries to build
“patiemment un sens toujours instable, en éternel devenir” (p. 15).


                                [Martina Panelli, Università degli Studi di Udine]




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