The article discusses the filmic representation of the Holocaust within the framework of the archive. To what extent adopt films archival techniques and operations or constitute something like ‘cinematic archives’ of the Holocaust? Films can assemble footage from the archive and bring it in a specific order but they can also use it as model for cinematic recreations. Thus, the preservation of visual and non-visual traces in feature films is always transformative and sometimes even distorting. By repeating and circulating ‘images of images’ such films turn visual heritage into a pattern of visual icons and create a stock of usable imagery, which in reverse also leaves other memories and remnants to forgetting. Such technique of repetition is also the basis for the transtextual character of cinematic archives, which also interconnects the storage (the assembling of images) with the register (the references towards earlier cinematic representations). To describe the logic, operations and the impact of cinematic archives of the Holocaust the article reviews such films as Schindler’s List, X-Men, The Pianist and Everything Is Illuminated, and discusses theoretical approaches by Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida.
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Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?How Films Constitute Cinematic Archives of the Holocaust
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Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?
How Films Constitute Cinematic Archives of the Holocaust
Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Hebrew University of Jerusalem




Abstract

    The article discusses the filmic representation of the Holocaust within the frame-
    work of the archive. To what extent adopt films archival techniques and opera-
    tions or constitute something like ‘cinematic archives’ of the Holocaust? Films can
    assemble footage from the archive and bring it in a specific order but they can also
    use it as model for cinematic recreations. Thus, the preservation of visual and non-
    visual traces in feature films is always transformative and sometimes even distort-
    ing. By repeating and circulating ‘images of images’ such films turn visual heritage
    into a pattern of visual icons and create a stock of usable imagery, which in reverse
    also leaves other memories and remnants to forgetting. Such technique of repeti-
    tion is also the basis for the transtextual character of cinematic archives, which
    also interconnects the storage (the assembling of images) with the register (the
    references towards earlier cinematic representations). To describe the logic, op-
    erations and the impact of cinematic archives of the Holocaust the article reviews
    such films as Schindler’s List, X-Men, The Pianist and Everything Is Illuminated,
    and discusses theoretical approaches by Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida.


   Once French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann noted that Steven Spielberg’s at-
tempt to make Schindler’s List (USA 1993) meant in fact to fabricate archives.1
With this statement Lanzmann indicated a crucial aspect of Spielberg’s depic-
tion of German businessman Oskar Schindler’s evolution from a profiteer of
anti-Jewish measures to a rescuer and caring friend of ‘his’ Jews. Actually Schin-
dler’s List constituted new archives on several levels and became a reservoir for
imagining the Holocaust. On the one hand the film literally constituted a new
archive and became the cornerstone of Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation Institute
and its unique collection of survivor’s testimonies. On the other hand Schindler’s
List reused and created iconic images and stereotypical figurations to visualize


1
  Claude Lanzmann, Ihr sollt nicht weinen. Einspruch gegen Schindlers Liste, in Christoph Weiss
(ed.), “Der gute Deutsche.” Dokumente zur Diskussion um Steven Spielbergs Schindlers Liste in
Deutschland, Rohrig Universitätsverlag, St. Imbert 1995, pp. 173-178, p. 175.

                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 24, Spring 2015
                                  Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann


the Holocaust and offered certain familiar patterns to construct a narrative that
eliminated its unease and disturbing challenges. Thus the film most influentially
transformed the history of the Holocaust from an experience of destruction and
death into a story of rescue and survival and offered certain patterns and formu-
las as well as iconic depictions for its future representation.2
   According to Lawrence Baron films and stories about the Holocaust are draw-
ing “on a rich source of previous movie plotlines and images,”3 hence the well-
known images of Nazism and the Holocaust are repeatedly represented in the
media, in film and in television. This ongoing repetition creates a situation in
which the circulating images also become a basic part of our mediated memory.4
Thus media and memory can linked on several levels. Through the notion of
post-memory Marianne Hirsch has emphasized the fact that photographs and
other visual evidence of the Holocaust are blended into personal family stories.
Within this “structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic
knowledge and experience” children of survivors refer to those images to il-
lustrate experiences that their parents did not have communicated.5 Hirsch and
others also proved that the technique of post-memory became a striking device
within the representation of the Holocaust, but also of other atrocities.6 Further-
more relying on Pierre Nora’s work on places of memory Alison Landsberg in-
troduced the concept of ‘prosthetic memory,’ interpreting cinema as a technical
tool to create sensual access to the past.7 Thomas Elsaesser then pointed towards
the “parapractic logic of Holocaust memory”8 and related it to the “parapractic
poetics”9 of Holocaust cinema. I myself tired elsewhere to investigate particular
narrative and stylistic operations of using and reusing iconic images and narra-
tive patterns to visualize the Holocaust in feature films.10


2
   This tendency was already regarded and broadly discussed when the film was released. See:
Miriam Hansen, “Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modern-
ism and Public Memory,” in Critical Inquiry, no. 22, Winter 1996, pp. 292-312; Lynn Rapaport,
“Hollywood’s Holocaust: Schindler’s List and the Construction of Memory,” in Film & History,
no. 1, May 2002, pp. 55-65.
3
  Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary
Holocaust Cinema, Lanham Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2005, p. 240.
4
  Anton Kaes, History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination, in Bruce A.
Murray, Christopher J. Wickham (eds.), Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema
and Television, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1992, pp. 308-323, p. 309.
5
  Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” in Poetics Today, no. 1, Spring 2008, p. 106.
6
  Ibidem. Elke Heckner, Whose Trauma Is It? Identification and Secondary Witnessing in the Age of
Postmemory, in David Bathrick, Brad Prager, Michael Richardson (eds.), Visualizing the Holocaust:
Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, Camden House, Rochester 2008, pp. 62-85.
7
  Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age
of Mass Culture, Columbia University Press, New York 2004.
8
  Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema: Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945, Routledge,
London-New York 2014, p. 63.
9
  Ivi, p. 59.
10
   Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Geschichtsbilder im medialen Gedächtnis. Filmische Narrationen des
Holocaust, Transcript, Bielefeld 2011.

34
                           Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?


   Those concepts proved increasingly helpful to review the cinematic de-
pictions of the past in relation to the personal and inter-personal struggles
of commemorating the Holocaust. Departing from approaches to understand
the interconnection of ‘cultural memory’ and ‘communicative memory’11 those
concepts emphasized the particular role media plays in this construction and
transmission of ‘Holocaust memory.’
   In the following paper I will discuss the filmic representation of the Holo-
caust within a different framework: the logic of the archive. To what extend
adopt films about the Holocaust archival techniques and operations or consti-
tute something like ‘cinematic archives’ of the Holocaust? This slight change of
perspective, compared to the memory-related discussion of Holocaust films, also
departs from the concept of cultural and communicative memory and its dis-
tinction into ‘Speichergedächtnis’ (stored memory) and ‘Funktionsgedächtnis’
(functional memory).12

     While the functional memory fulfills such important tasks as identity construction or
     the legitimization of an existing societal form, the stored memory is no less important.
     It serves as a ‘reservoir for future functional memories,’ ‘as a resource for the renewal of
     cultural knowledge’ […].13

   Films seem to interrelate both aspects. They constitute particular archives
for imagining the past and recreate what was not recorded or preserved (stored
memory), and they embed those images within a particular narrative (functional
memory). In the following I want to discuss how far those films follow or even
constitute a particular logic of cinematic archives. Besides the question how films
use and reuse images from earlier films I am particularly interested in reviewing
the impact of transtextual aesthetics, which might also provide a specific access
to this ‘stock’ of images and patterns similar to the index of an archive.


The logic of cinematic archives

   A film can adopt historic footage and assemble it in a specific order but it
can also use archival material as model for cinematic recreations. While docu-
mentary films mostly use and reuse footage from public and private archives to
illustrate the past feature films about the Holocaust also fill the gaps of missing
images through imagination and re-enactments and thus provide ‘new’ images


11
   Jan Assmann, Communicative and Cultural Memory, in Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (eds.),
Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, De Gruyter, Berlin-
New York 2008, pp. 109-118.
12
   Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Das Gestern im Heute. Medien und soziales Gedächtnis, in Klaus
Merten et al. (eds.), Die Wirklichkeit der Medien. Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissen-
schaften, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1994, pp. 114-140, p. 122-123.
13
   Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke-New York 2011, p. 36.

                                                                                              35
                                 Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann


of the past. While documentary films mostly refer to witnesses whose words
are supposed to ‘revive’ the past in the imagination of the spectators feature
films can bring into shape non-visual evidence such as testimonies and thus
create definitive images out of the imagination of the listeners or readers. Thus
the preservation of visual and non-visual traces in feature films is always trans-
formative and sometimes even distorting. By repeating and circulating ‘images
of images’ such films turn visual heritage into a pattern of visual icons and
create a stock of usable imagery, which in reverse also leaves other memories
and remnants to forgetting.14 Thus such cinematic archives of the Holocaust
assemble images that circulate in popular culture and are especially mediated
through films and television.
   Cinematic archives occupy an ephemeral and virtual place, thus different from
the ‘archive film,’ which is stored in a physical (film) archive. Film itself serves
as storage room for the traces of the past. But while the film compilation out of
archive footage at least in part makes visible the ‘original material’ and assembles
the loose findings from the archives in a certain order feature films provide a
different access towards the visual remnants of the past. They use the power of
imagination to fill the gaps between the preserved images and often fabricate the
content of a new (imaginary) archive. Furthermore they are sometimes pretend
to gather definite images of the past (‘as it really was’) although these recreations
are nevertheless fragmentary, unstable and in permanent transition.
   How far then do feature films about the Holocaust constitute cinematic ar-
chives at all, especially when an archive, in the words of Jacques Derrida, has
to “be deposited somewhere, on a stable substrate, and at the disposition of a
legitimate hermeneutic authority.”15 One might argue that film could be seen
as a ‘stable substrate’ but what about the place and the ‘hermeneutic authority’
that are mentioned. While the specific mobility and accessibility of film, in vari-
ous media and at various places in different times, is part of the distinct logic of
cinematic archives the ‘hermeneutic authority’ might be a specific dispositive,
an alignment constituted by the film, its spectators and the social and political
discourses that are framing it. Furthermore Derrida’s notion of “consignation”
might be of help. Next to the “functions of unification, of identification, of
classification” consignation does not only mean “the act of assigning residence
or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place
and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together
signs.”16 The latter is of specific importance as cinematic archives can be mainly
seen as doing such “gathering together signs,” which they assemble within a
specific order (or narrative) of the past:


14
   Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, “Migrating Images: Iconic Images of the Holocaust and the Repre-
sentation of War in Popular Film,” in Shofar, no. 4, Summer 2010, pp. 86-103, p. 90.
15
   Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive, Ed. Galilée, Paris 1995 (Eng. ed. Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 1996, p. 3).
16
   Ibidem.

36
                          Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?


     Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all
     the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should
     not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secer-
     nere), or partition, in an absolute manner.17

   Similarly the cinematic archives of the Holocaust tend towards visibility,
closeness and repetition, which Derrida marks as a fundamental technique of
the archive.18 Such technique of repetition is also the basis for the transtex-
tual character of the cinematic archives, which also interconnects the storage
(the assembling of images) with the register (the references towards earlier
cinematic representations).
   Departing from these assumptions two aspects that constitute the archive,
the ‘assembling mode’ and the ‘indexing mode,’ are intertwined. I suppose that
this is a very important notion of what I call cinematic archives. But, as Der-
rida highlights, there is “[n]o archive without outside,”19 and that refers also to
the destabilizing force of transtextuality. By adding a third mode – the tracing
mode – I therefore also want to include those examples that implicitly or explic-
itly uncover their affinity to the archive.


The transtextual character of cinematic archives

   In retrospective Schindler’s List can be seen as one of the most influential at-
tempts to approach the Holocaust through a specific composition of recreating,
repeating and superposing images and elements from earlier films and photo-
graphic evidence. Thus Daniel R. Schwarz emphasized that “Spielberg’s Holo-
caust images are generic crystallizing images borrowed from prior texts and films
that become a reservoir of intertextual resources. In a way, Spielberg’s film de-
pends on evoking memories from our past knowledge of Holocaust texts […].”20
In the following I want to illustrate the operations of cinematic archives by in-
vestigating the transtextual techniques within the film’s composition that help to
constitute a visual archive that superposes but also preserves earlier cinematic
representations of the historic events. Thus we should take a closer look on the
palimpsest character of such transtextual configuration of cinematic archives.
   The French literary theorist Gérard Genette emphasizes that a palimpsest is
characterized by transtextual operations, which relate a particular text (or in our
case: film) in a manifest or secret way to another.21 He describes five subtypes
of transtextuality, which are useful to analyze the films that are discussed here.
Intertextuality, the most common type, indicates the coexistence of two or more

17
   Ibidem.
18
   Ivi, p. 11.
19
   Ibidem.
20
   Daniel R. Schwarz, Imagining the Holocaust, St. Martins Griffin Press, New York 1999, p. 229.
21
   Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes, Le Seuil, Paris 1982, p. 9.

                                                                                              37
                                   Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann


texts in another text, which constitutes an interchange of meanings and effects.
The main techniques of intertextuality would be quotation and allusion.22
   In Schindler’s List we find intertextual allusion in the scenes from the evacu-
ation of the Krakow ghetto, which mark a turning point in the transforma-
tion of the protagonist.23 In this sequence recreations of historic images are
embedded, such as of a historic photograph picturing suitcases and luggage
scattered on a street after the brutal evacuation. Also the representation of
camp Plaszow, to which the inhabitants of the ghetto were then transferred, is
referring to well-known historic photographs. A famous image that depicts its
topography from a bird’s eye perspective serves, for example, as a warrant for
the authentic reconstruction of the place. But Schindler’s List puts the visual
evidence in different order by changing its original intention, the documenta-
tion of the camp’s efficient and orderly operation, to illustrate the comman-
dant’s almighty controlling gaze.
   Besides such references to real time events Spielberg also imparts recreations
of well-known iconic images that already became an integral part of the Holo-
caust’s visual heritage. This includes, for example, the shots of female prisoners
standing behind barbed wire, which is clearly based on a famous picture taken
by American photographer Margret Bourke-White after the liberation of Bu-
chenwald that is showing the former prisoners standing at the camp’s fence.24
By placing such recreations at the cornerstones of its narrative the film, seen
under the aspect of the cinematic archive, makes it also possible to fill the gaps
in-between those iconic images. For example the recreated photographs of aban-
doned suitcases during the evacuation of the Krakow ghetto frame the cinematic
imagination of the events including point-of-view shots from the perspective of
the Jewish inhabitants. Thus the fabrication of a cinematic archive encompasses
the inclusion of recreated archive footage and photographs as well as the imagi-
nary reconstruction of the events from which no images were preserved.
   Within the other types mentioned by Genette, para-, archi-, and metatextual-
ity, the concept of hypertextuality is of particular interest for our case. Hyper-
textuality describes the relation between a preceding hypotext and a subsequent
hypertext, which superposes, modifies and transforms the former.
   Schindler’s List, seen as a hypertext, refers for instance to the Polish fea-
ture Ostatni etap (The Last Stop, Poland 1947) by former Auschwitz prisoner
Wanda Jakubowska as a hypotextual film.25 This film was already being planed


22
   Ivi, p. 10.
23
   Miriam Hansen has discussed this particular sequence in detail mainly focusing on its sound/
image relation, but she did not mention its intertextual references to archive footage. See: Id.,
“Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism and Public
Memory,” cit., p. 304-305.
24
   Marianne Hirsch also refers to this motive in context of her studies on post-memory and shows
for example how Art Spiegelman is using this picture to fill the gaps of his own ‘family album,’ see:
Id., “The Generation of Postmemory,” cit., p. 113.
25
   Stuart Liebman, “Pages from the Past: Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stop (Ostatni Etap),” in

38
                        Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?


when Jakubowska was liberated from Ravensbrück concentration camp and
shot shortly after on location in Auschwitz. It was based on her own memories
from everyday life in the camp, and several of her fellow comrades partici-
pated in the filming. Schindler’s List preserves Jakubowska’s film for the future
but at the same time absorbs it into its narrative what can foremost be seen
in the depiction of the camps. In Schindler’s List typical situations from The
Last Stop are embedded, such as the wet and muddy ground, roll call scenes,
yelling during raids and the bleak atmosphere.26
   But Schindler’s List does not only reuse elements from feature films. During the
preparation Spielberg was researching particularly documentary films as source
for the visual representation.27 Thus obviously the film also restages a central
sequence from Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, France 1955) in
which numerous suitcases, shoes, eyeglasses and other ownerless belongings are
recorded by a tracking camera. What is particular striking in this insertion of the
recreated sequence is that already Night and Fog had constituted an archive by
collecting recently unseen and even unknown footage from different archives.28
   Also the third hypotext, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, constituted a new archive.
Although Lanzmann avoided including any iconic and emblematic archive foot-
age in his documentary film its collection of testimonies provides new access to
the past and, as Thomas Elsaesser has emphasized, had already created “a differ-
ent kind of archive.”29 By recreating testimonies from Shoah and imposing them
into the narrative of his film Spielberg claims a definitely pictured past. This
becomes obvious in a central sequence in Schindler’s List, in which a group of
women from Schindler’s factory is accidentally transported to Auschwitz. In this
sequence Spielberg shows three times and from different perspectives a young
Polish boy indicating with a gesture of his hand the nearby death awaiting the
deportees. This gesture is directly borrowed from Shoah. Thus the crystallized
image in Schindler’s List inverts Lanzmann’s testimonial approach.
   Thus the specificity of cinematic archives is that in contrast to other archival
operations they are assembling the material within a new narrative order that
is already providing a certain way of reading. Besides that they hide the origin
of the collected material. It is already stored in a transformed, sometimes even
distorted manner. Thus although providing the inventory for visual historical
consciousness of popular culture such films constitute a kind of fabricated ar-
chives that are supposed to fill the gaps of the existing historical archives and
replace its missing images.


East European Performance: Drama, Theatre, Film, no. 3, Fall 1996, pp. 56-63.
26
   Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema, cit., p. 74.
27
   Hellmuth Karasek, “Die ganze Wahrheit schwarz auf Weiß. Regisseur Steven Spielberg über
seinen Film Schindlers Liste,” in Der Spiegel, February 21, 1994, pp. 183-186, p. 184.
28
   Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuit et Brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire, Edition Odile Jacob, Paris
2007. Night and Fog even includes two sequences from The Last Stop and matches them with
documentary footage from the camps.
29
   Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema, cit., p. 77.

                                                                                         39
                                   Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann


The stock of cinematic archives

   To describe the impact of such cinematic archives of the Holocaust the open-
ing sequence of X-Men (USA 2000) deserves a closer look. This first part of a
series about mutants with supernatural capabilities who are increasingly perse-
cuted by their fellow ‘normal’ humans surprisingly starts somewhere in Poland
in 1944. We witness the arrival and selection of Jewish prisoners in a camp. By
using well known iconic images, metonymic motifs and stereotypical figurations
the opening establishes the historic setting within minutes because the audience
immediately knows how to understand these visual and narrative cues.
   It starts with a particular setting and atmosphere. We picture muddy ground
and rainy weather, a motif that constantly reappears in Holocaust movies.30 The
dull and gloomy mood is intended to enhance the impression of a strange and
threatening place. Accordingly the following shot depicts a uniformed guard
with a rifle that probably not by accident recalls a historic photograph taken at
Camp Sachsenhausen from the overlooking perspective of a watchtower.
   The next shot pictures a line of walking people on a gangway in-between bar-
bered wire, another well-known motif that was already part of the film footage,
which Polish and Soviet camera men shot quickly after the liberation in Maj-
danek and Auschwitz. It is followed by a series includes close ups of individual
faces. First we see a man with a hat. Attached to his coat is the ‘Yellow Star,’
another iconic sign of the Holocaust. Then the camera pans towards a young boy
and a woman. Mother and child are a prototypical figuration in films about the
Holocaust as well as the separation of a Jewish family, which established already
the main narrative conflict of the television series Holocaust (USA 1979).31
   These shots are succeeded by a series of views that are explicitly indicated as
point-of-view-shots of the boy. A close up of his face marks the following depic-
tions of forced laborers in prisoners’ clothes with tattooed numbers on the one
hand as subjective perspective and on the other accentuates those images as iconic.
The following tumultuous scenes include further familiar situations and figura-
tions: the selection, the confrontation of prisoners and guarding soldiers, barking
dogs, barbed wire. Within only a few minutes nearly the whole set of Holocaust
images are triggered by relying on condensed information clusters and visual ste-
reotypes.32 Within the genre of an action film the historic event is invoked as a
cinematic stereotype that – in the words of Lawrence Baron – “establishes more
substantial connections to the Holocaust to clarify the motivations of its leading
villain and draw parallels between it and contemporary prejudices.”33

30
   Hanno Loewy, Fiktion und Mimesis: Holocaust and Genre in Film, in Margrit Frölich, Hanno
Loewy, Heinz Steinert (eds.), Lachen über Hitler – Auschwitz Gelächter, Edition Text + Kritik,
Munich 2003, pp. 37-64, p. 38.
31
   Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Geschichtsbilder im medialen Gedächtnis. Filmische Narrationen des
Holocaust, cit., p. 294.
32
   Anton Kaes, History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination, cit., p. 315.
33
   Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary

40
                          Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?


   Finally in a significant twist the ending of the opening sequence superim-
poses an emblematic image, the familiar depiction of the entrance gate of Aus-
chwitz, with a fantastic substitute. Shaped by the supernatural power of the
mutant the cross fading of this visual icon enables a change of perspectives:
from historical reconstruction towards the fictional mode of popular culture.
Only now also the ‘outside’ of the archive – the imaginary power of cinema – is
addressed and we witness the destabilizing force of the transtextual structure
of the cinematic archives.
   Interestingly X-Men furthermore did not only rely on the visual material that
was provided by earlier films dealing with the period of the Holocaust such
as Schindler’s List. The opening sequence of the first part became also a new
intratextual archive on which the succeeding prequel X-Men: First Class (USA
2011) could exclusively rely.34 This episode depicts the back-story of Magneto
and opened with the very same arrangement of images like the first part. Shot
by shot the prequel recreated the opening sequence of its predecessor from
2001 and thus used it as an archive for visualizing Magneto’s trauma. Through
this reference both films are also interconnected and X-Men: First Class is thus
indexed as X-Men’s missing link.


The recording gaze of the cinematic archives

   But although such cinematic archives are trans- and intratextually porous
they nevertheless seem to correspond what Derrida addresses as the problem of
the “concept of the archive”: “To have a concept at one’s disposal, to have as-
surances with regard to it, is to presuppose a closed heritage and the guarantee
sealed, in some sense, by that heritage.”35 Thus turning back to the question of
consignation we should not address the homogenous character of the archive
but also the assembling of disparate material. This becomes notably challenging
in case of cinematic archives of atrocities, because: “Without this evil, which is
also archive fever, the desire and the disorder of the archive, there would be
neither assignation nor consignation.”36
   The Pianist (UK, Poland, Germany 2002) by Polish-Jewish director Roman
Polanski, who himself survived the Holocaust as a child, can be seen as such an
archive of assignation due to its specific palimpsest character of assembling dif-


Holocaust Cinema, cit., p. 259. Magneto, the young boy Eric Lehnsherr in the opening sequence,
represents those mutants who oppose the forced assimilation to ‘normal’ humans and insist on
their difference and particularity. As suggested by the film’s opening sequence Magneto’s attitude
is shaped by his family’s separation and his camp experience.
34
   Although not explicitly relying on Holocaust references the latest prequel X-Men: Days of Future
Past (2014) went even further by taking the X-Men films literally as archival source and directly
cited images and sequences from its predecessors.
35
   Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, cit., p. 33.
36
   Ivi, p. 81.

                                                                                                41
                                   Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann


ferent references and sources. Only after he came across the testimony of Polish-
Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman did Polanski find an adequate basis for such
his film. Szpilman, who survived German occupation in the Warsaw ghetto and
in hiding, wrote down his experiences immediately after the war and used for his
testimony a very documentary and sober style. This style also affected Polanski’s
cinematic adaptation in The Pianist. Thus he focusses very much on presenting
the events through the protagonist’s eyes and avoids overdramatization.
   Although Polanski abstains from blending any archive footage or historic pho-
tographs into the story line he allusively refers to those well-known images that
the Nazis depicted in the Ghetto during spring 1942 in order to produce an anti-
Semitic propaganda film. Some of these recreations illustrate the topography of
the ghetto and the setting of the film; others present iconic places that are re-
called from historic pictures such as the ghetto wall or the significant pedestrian’s
bridge that connected the two parts of the ghetto.
   In his film Polanski tries to counter the ambiguity of these images by revers-
ing their origin and imparting a more emphatic gaze that senses suffering and
humiliation. Although therefore hiding the perpetrator’s gaze in its recreations
the film nevertheless makes visible the filming perpetrators and hints towards the
fact that the ghetto was a place where the Germans created a reality according to
their anti-Semitic phantasm. Thus The Pianist creates a cinematic archive from
the visible memory of the ghetto by placing iconic perpetrator footage into a dif-
ferent order and reframes their original perspective.
   But even more important is that Polanski changes the source of the witnessing
gaze from the perpetrator’s camera to his Jewish protagonist who is witnessing
life in the ghetto, during the uprising and in wartime Warsaw. Thus the audience
sees the events through the eyes of a witnessing victim. The visualization of this
act of witnessing constitutes the dominant perspective of The Pianist and shapes
its narrative form. Through this inversion Polanski thwarts the propagandistic
intention of the original images and replaces it with a new look onto the well-
known remnants of the past. Through this change of perspectives the film is able
to detach oneself from the patterns that were inscribed in the original footage.
   This can be demonstrated regarding the highly emotional sequence, in
which Szpilman’s family is deported from the ghetto. Because Szpilman was
safeguarded by a Jewish policeman and is standing behind the barrier watch-
ing the deportation he literally changed sides. What he witnesses are indeed
reenactments of popular icons of the Holocaust – film fragments that were sup-
posedly shot at the boarding of a deportation train near Lublin, which appear
in several documentary films about the Holocaust.37
   Besides Szpilman’s memories and the visual remnants of the Warsaw ghetto
The Pianist adapts also a third source because Polanski sneaks into the film el-


37
  One of the first films that presented this material was Night and Fog. Resnais combined the footage
from Poland showing an old man with two children at a platform and people who are helping oth-
ers to enter the cattle cars with the famous archive film from the Dutch transit camp in Westerbork.

42
                          Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?


ements from his own memories of the time when he was in the Krakow ghetto
and in hiding. Although he steps back behind Szpilman as main witness of
the film’s events Polanski creates a certain texture of memories and visible
evidence from different sources.38
   Such a symbolic moment, whose representation is shaped by the director’s
personal memory, is again the highly emotional deportation sequence. Intro-
duced by the last gathering of the family this sequence visualizes the final sepa-
ration of Szpilman and his relatives. But Szpilman’s wondrous rescue is partly
based on Polanski’s own experiences. As a boy he was able to escape from the
ghetto’s collecting point with the help of a Polish policeman who ordered them
after starting to run away that they should move slowly.39 Polanski included this
advice into the story line of his film.
   Thus Polanski assembled with The Pianist a multilayered archive from dif-
ferent sources that preserved their traces and transformed them into a film.
Through imparting these elements from the original testimony, his personal
memories and the perpetrators’ footage into a narrative that is structured by
the visibility of witnessing, Polanski is on the one hand able to invert and adopt
diverse sources. On the other hand he indirectly also provides a register to in-
dex and relate the traces to other archives.40 That way the sources – Szpilman’s
testimony, the historic photographs and films as well as Polanski’s personal
memories – assemble and assign a specific picture from the past. In contrast to
Spielberg’s attempt of presupposing a ‘closed heritage’ and thus proclaiming
a final archive, which overwrites its sources, The Pianist preserves, revitalizes
and usurps diverse remnants of the past to make them accessible in the present.
Therefore the film can be seen itself as a palimpsest of remembrance that opens
access to engage the leftovers of the past.


The tracing mode of cinematic archives

   As seen, transtextual operations and the recreation of iconic images are an im-
portant element of such palimpsest memories. This is also related to another op-
erational mode of the archive, the transmission of transgenerational heritage. In
his discussion of the Freudian dimension of the archive Derrida also addresses
these “archival problems of oral narrative and public property, of mnemic traces,


38
   Kobi Kabalek, Unheroic Heroes: Re-Viewing Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) in Germany and
Israel, in Vera Apfelthaler, Julia B. Köhne (eds.), Gendered Memories: Transgressions in German and
Israeli Film and Theater, Turia + Kant, Vienna 2007, pp. 61-82, p. 63.
39
   Roman Polanski, Roman Polanski von Roman Polanski, Scherz Verlag, Munich-Vienna 1984,
p. 15.
40
   A significant extension of Polanski’s cinematic archive of the heritage from the Warsaw ghetto
was for example provided by Yael Hersonski’s documentary film Geheimsache Ghettofilm (A
Film Unfinished, Israel-Germany 2010), which reviews and investigates the propaganda film
from the ghetto.

                                                                                                43
                                 Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann


of archaic and transgenerational heritage, and of everything that can happen to an
‘impression’ in these at once ‘topic’ (topisch) and ‘genetic’ (genetisch) processes.”41
   The last version of a cinematic archive combines the transgenerational dimen-
sion with the topic one. Furthermore it also proves the “everything that can hap-
pen” and thus emphasizes cinema’s potential to create a different affective rela-
tion to the past by turning archiving and preservation into particular cinematic
operations and a particular tracing mode of searching for traces in the present
rather than reconstructing the past. In contrast to Schindler’s List and The Pianist
Liev Schreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated (USA 2005) is situated in the present
and follows the narrative of a journey. That changes the perspective from recon-
structing the past to accessing it through memory with the help of leftovers and
remnants that still remain. Schreiber’s film is based on the successful novel with
the same title by Jonathan Safran Foer but mostly refers to the basic plot of its
pretext, the story A Very Rigid Search, which Foer had published in the New
Yorker in 2001. This story was not only the nucleus of the later novel but also the
outcome of a research trip without any result:

     I found nothing but nothing, and in that nothing — a landscape of completely realized
     absence — nothing was to be found. […] I didn’t know what questions to ask, or whom
     to ask, or the necessary names of people, places, and things. The nothing came as much
     from me as from what I encountered.42

   Thus Schreiber’s film itself is already a multiple hypertext not only referring to
its paratext, the novel, but also to its hidden pretext as a hypotext. The practices
of the archive, collecting and storing, overlaying and superimposing, were al-
ready at work within the production process and thus shaped the film’s composi-
tion. At the same time the experience of a quest without a result thwarts the idea
of the complete archive, which would be able to preserve the past in extenso.
While the protagonist of the film, Foer’s own alter ego, represents the desire of
collecting everything to avoid forgetting, the film itself presents the process of
searching as precondition for imagining the past and refilling its gaps – not with
definite images but with present experiences.
   Therefore the film itself provides a cinematic map for the topography of an
imaginary archive that even brings together different geographic spaces. This
concept is already visualized in the opening sequence, which juxtaposes the ma-
terial remnants of the past, from the collection of protagonist Jonathan Foer, with
a map of the Ukraine and the voice over of the other protagonist, the Ukrainian
tour guide Alexander, who states that he had thought that the past should be
buried until he had met Jonathan.43 From here on both characters represent two

41
   Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, cit., p. 34.
42
    “A Conversation with Jonathan Safran Foer,” in Press Release Everything Is Illuminated,
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/pdf/everything_foer.pdf, p.
4, last visit 16 June 2014.
43
   Eric A. Goldman, The American Jewish Story through Cinema, University of Texas Press, Austin

44
                       Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?


dimensions of the archive, the archivist and collector Foer, and the historian
and narrator Alexander. The topographic space of this archive is also split, not
only geographically between the United States and the Ukraine, but also spatially
between the vertical plain ‘screen’ of Foer’s collection of manifold items that
are stored in plastic bags and fixed on his room’s wall on the one side and the
horizontal deep space of the Ukrainian landscape that functions as a stage, on
which the memories of the past evolve. The third spatial model of the archive is
the small house in the midst of a field full with sunflowers, in which Lista, the last
survivor of the Shtetl Trachimbrod lives, which Foer, Alexander and his grouchy
grandfather are searching for. The walls of this house are filled with boxes full of
remnants from the past, the equivalent to Jonathan’s plastic bags at the wall. But
while the latter recalls much more the model of a museum, which exhibits such
leftovers and thus creates a particular narrative with a particular orderly sense,
Lista’s boxes in contrast are foremost preserving a lost world for an indefinite
future. Thus Lista represents the archivist’s function as a “keeper of memory.”44
She even enables access though her personal memories that extend the material
remnants such as to a series of photographs, which she has taken from one of the
boxes with the inscription “In Case.” The fourth archival space is the deserted
space of the former Shtetl, which was destroyed by the Germans who also killed
the local Jewish population among them Augustine, Jonathan’s grandfather’s for-
mer wife. This place doesn’t reveal anything. It represents the archive as a voided
grave that finally buried the memory of those who lived and perished here. But
the film takes this deserted place, the ‘empty screen,’ as a starting point for a
cinematic evocation of memories through words and imagination. While Lista
serves as a medium that reveals the past through narration Alexander’s grandfa-
ther admits his longtime suppressed memories of these traumatic events, which
he himself survived just by chance and only by leaving behind every remnant
of his own Jewish past and identity. His memories are embedded into the film
as imaginary flashbacks based on iconic signs and images such as the ‘Yellow
Star’ or prototypical situations such as mass executions. But by assembling these
floating memories likewise a puzzle little by little the film does not only express
the challenges of such a fabrication of a suppressed and traumatic past and its
fragmentary and palimpsest structure it also clearly marks it as an encounter be-
tween past and present and therefore as an archival operation. Thus the task of
the film’s journey is not so much the revelation of the past. It is much more the
conscious fabrication of memory as a living ground for the future:

   Jonathan and Alexander, Third Generation, both grandchildren of Trachimbrod, who
   live on opposite sides of an ocean, now share a common memory, their story, their Hag-
   gadah to be shared with their offspring.45


2013, p. 188.
44
   Ivi, p. 167.
45
   Ivi, p. 200.

                                                                                      45
                                   Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann


   The narrative of the search thus is explicitly directed towards accessing the ar-
chive from an unrecoverable past. But this archive would not only be composed
from documents and authentic material leftovers but also, as Eric A. Goldman’s
reference towards the Jewish Haggadah that retells the story of the Exodus from
Egypt indicates, from story-telling and imagination.


Conclusion: the quest for the (future) archive

  In this manner cinematic archives do not only lock the past in crystalized im-
ages and fabricate archives. Rather they can also create a vivid experience of the
challenging impact of the past for our present life. Thus the archive is – as also
Derrida emphasizes – always directed to the future:

     It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our dis-
     posal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the
     future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a
     responsibility for tomorrow.46

    All examples in this paper in a more or less explicit way implied this ori-
entation towards the future. While Polanski assembled different sources to
preserve a particular picture of the destruction of Warsaw and the Warsaw
ghetto that culminated in the simulacrum-like dystopian image from the ruins
of Warsaw, X-Men literally related the past experience of its villain Magneto to
a future that finally has to deal with the heritage of intolerance and marginali-
zation. It is obvious that Everything Is Illuminated constituted new encounters
between the ‘old’ world in Europe and its offspring in the United States for an
‘illuminated’ future but even Schindler’s List constituted the cornerstone for a
future archive when leading to the establishing of the Visual History Archive
of the USC Shoah Foundation.47
    In addition to memory-related approaches the concept of the archive offers
another model to describe different cinematic operations of visualizing and thus
preserving the past. Such operations can also make visible their own operators
and thus their specific logic of cinematic archives. Transtextual transmission is
therefore a central operational tool. Either hiding sources or references behind
iconic and crystallized images or offering access for reentering the past as a quest
from the present the archive becomes a cinematic model. Its moving force (and
authority) is the transmission of a still persisting past:



 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, cit., p. 36.
46

 For a discussion of the archive in context of video testimony collections see (though referring to
47

Fortunoff Archive): Amit Pinchevski, Archive, Media, Trauma, in Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, Eyal
Zandberg (eds.), On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, Palgrave Macmillan,
Basingstoke-New York 2011, pp. 253-264.

46
                             Preserving Memory or Fabricating the Past?


      Without the irrepressible […] force and authority of this transgenerational memory, the
      problems of which we speak would be dissolved and resolved in advance. There would no
      longer be any essential history of culture, there would no longer be any question of memory
      and of archive, […] and one would no longer even understand how an ancestor can speak
      within us, not what sense there might me in us to speak to him or her.48

   By projecting the topography of the archive and its operations of archiving
into the cinematic space cinematic archives are able to evoke a porous interspace
for such (future) encounters and reencounters with the past.




48
     Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, cit., pp. 35-36.

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