at 1:00 p.m.
[free passes may be picked up from the press center in Grand Hotel and information point in Manufaktura or may be reserved by email: gorgona@4kultury.pl]

Setting Eyes on the Gorgon. The Holocaust, Nazism and the Problem of Representation
project partner: Uniwersytet Łódzki

 

This is a two-day project around Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Images in Spite of All, taking up the issue of the esthetic capacity and ethical appropriateness of creating visual representations of the Holocaust. Films that stand as ‘turning points’ in the development of Holocaust discourse will be discussed in the project: Memory of the Camps (dir. Sidney Bernstein, cooperation: Alfred Hitchcock, 1944), Night and Fog (dir. Alain Resnais, 1955), Vernichtungslager Majdanek – Cemetery of Europe (dir. Alexander Ford, 1944) and Histoire(s) du cinéma - Toutes les histoires (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1988), and works that will serve of points of departure for discussions about Nazi esthetics: Zeit der Götter (dir. Lutz Dammbeck, 1992), and Der ewige Jude (dir. Fritz Hippler, 1940). There will also be lectures by Stuart Liebman, an American film historian dealing with film representations of the Holocaust and Georges Didi-Huberman, a French philosopher and art historian, and a world-famous theorist of the image. Another important context will be the two panel discussions, featuring Georges Didi-Huberman, Andrzej Leśniak, Stuart Liebman, Tomasz Majewski, Paweł Mościcki and Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska. The first of these – Image-archive, Image-montage – will concern cinematic representations of the concentration camps, while the second – Image-fetish – will tackle the ideology of ‘visual plenitude’ in Nazi art and the relationships between the ‘formal drive’ and the ‘death drive.’ Both will look at the theme of depiction in its two antithetical aspects: the ‘unrepresentability’ of the Holocaust and the ‘spectacularity’ of Nazism.


Memory of the Camps (1945), 56'
direction: Sidney Bernstein
cooperation: Alfred Hitchcock

A documentary about the liberation of camps at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald made  using photographic archives of British and American armies, created in cooperation with Alfred Hitchcock, who worked on the concept of its editing. Shocking images of the extermination camps were to be shown after the war to the German population, which never took place because of the political changes of the allied occupational rule in Germany. Military command of the British occupation zone, which struck off this idea, argued that the priority for Germans should not be triggering a feeling of guilt for the camps, but “snatching them out of apathy” and acting to reduce the spreading surge of suicides. For many years the film was considered to be lost, until it was found in the Imperial War Museum in London in 1985.


Night and Fog (1955), 31'
direction: Alain Resnais

Night and Fog is a poetic document dedicated to the memory of Auschwitz, created during the decade of the liberation of the camp. The film links black-and-white and colour takes, stills of archive photographs and slow panning through the grounds of the camp, conveying the relationship of “then” to “now”, horror and mournful silence. The soundtrack to the document are monologues by a former prisoner of Auschwitz, poet and translator Paul Celan, Jean Cayrol and music by Hans Eisler, a friend and close collaborator of Theodor Adorno. The film set a canonical way of depicting places of extermination, polemically referred to by Claude Lanzmann in his Shoah. Resnais’ film wrestled with French censorship, which ordered the director to cover up a kepi of a French gendarme, supervising prisoners of a concentration camp in Drancy, in one of the archive photographs.


Vernichtungslager Majdanek – Cemetery of Europe (1944), 20'
direction: Aleksander Ford

First ever film depicting an extermination camp, the document was filmed in the summer of 1944 by Czołówka Filmowa Wojska Polskiego [a photography and film section of the Polish Army] during the liberation of the Majdanek camp. In its creation were involved Roman Karmen, a famous Russian lead cameraman, and Stanisław and Adolf Wohl. During the liberation, Polish and Soviet armies encountered still operational cremation ovens, containing smouldering human remains, a group of prisoners awaiting gassing, and eight hundred and twenty thousand pairs of shoes and clothes left from the prisoners now turned to ashes. Ford’s photographic material was cited in many subsequent films about extermination camps, yet it is the only film documenting the liberation of an active camp, which the Nazis didn’t manage to liquidate.


Historie(s) du cinéma – Toutes les histoires part I, episode 1 (1988), 51'
direction: Jean-Luc Godard

The famous director’s video dedicated to the complex relationship between cinema and remembrance, and the comprehension of cinema as a visual history/memory of the 20th century. Godard overlays fragments of fictional films and documentary stills. From their superimposition and the emerging contradictions, from the commentary spoken by the director and the captions pulsating in the field of vision, emerges the reminiscence of historical events never before directly represented. Godard defies conventions by editing photographs of prisoners’ corpses in Dachau, taken from George Stevens’ war-time film diary on a colour 16mm tape, with a take of Elizabeth Taylor from his own Hollywood film A place in the sun. He suggests by this that the director’s same eyes saw one and the other, and the constellation of these images reveals that cinema has a moral right to depict love scenes because it had the courage to document the camp.


Time of the Gods (1992), 95'
direction: Lutz Dammbeck

Feature-length documentary of the German artist, creator of “media collages” and experimental productions Metamorphosen I (1979), Hommage à la Sarraz (1981) or Herakles Höhle (1983-1990). The film tells the story of the Third Reich’s most famous sculptor – Arno Breker (1990-1990), creator of monumental allegories of the Nazi party and the Wehrmacht. It represents an insightful search for an undercurrent of German tradition, starting long before Nazism and tying in Stefan George’s circle, Klages, Ariosophy, secret teachings about the Artamanen and student associations Wadervogel, and continuing after the war. In reference to Nazi aesthetics, Dammbeck considers such phenomena as Ernst Jünger’s works, heroic realism, and personal and artistic connections of Arno Breker himself. The film ends with an unsettling question: “The attempt to realise the vision of the return of the gods suffered political defeat in 1945. Defeat was also suffered by Arno Breker, who served this vision. Components of this vision remained, ready to be reassembled. In the beginning, giants and titans grow in the shadows, says Ernst Jünger. Today, after the transitional phase, will old gods return again?”


The Eternal Jew (1940), 62'
direction: Fritz Hippler

The most infamous anti-Semitic film of the Third Reich, filmed partially in Łódź’s Old Town and at Bałuty at the turn of 1939. In a mock-documentary style it portrays life in the Jewish trade quarter, the slaughter of animals in a kosher butchery. It shows the so-called “Jewish types”, with editorial comparisons to insects. Hippler’s film came about at Goebbels’ special request, and it was shown in cinemas prior to the deportation of Berlin Jews to the Łódź ghetto in autumn 1941, for which it was meant to “morally prepare” Berlin’s population. From today’s perspective, Der ewige Jude constitutes not only a document of the Nazi worldview, and can be seen as a prelude to the “final solution to the Jewish question”, but is also one of the few remaining film records of Łódź’s Jewish quarter. 
 

Respite (2007), 40'
direction: Harun Farocki

A documentary film using unique archive material from 1944 filmed by a Jewish prisoner at the transfer concentration camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands – Rudolf Breslauer. All prisoners of the Westerbork camp – created in 1939 by the Dutch authorities, with the aim of interning German Jews – were later gassed in Auschwitz; including the man who filmed them. Harun Farocki equips this rediscovered film material with a sparing commentary, identifying some of the victims and presenting their likeness while still alive alongside information about the number of the transport, the date when they left Westerbork, and the date of their death in Auschwitz. The film shows the camp – with no elements of violence, full of calm and day-to-day activities – are transferred by the director into our collective memory, in which completely different icons of the camps have been recorded – showing the piles of dead bodies discovered in them at their liberation (40 min.)