Page 59 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Time of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Film images.

istic feature films that he extolls do not question the rep-
resentation of the Holocaust in any way, thus suggest-
ing, as it were, that the Holocaust is a story which can
be told like any other, using the same construction
mechanisms of a film spectacle as in any commercial
film, whereas the narrative style, as mentioned earlier,
is not just an empty container – on the contrary, it is
a vehicle of the traumatic dimension of the Holocaust,
– its essence.
One of the episodes of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-
Marie Mieville’s TV documentary series France/Tour/
Detour/Two/Children features the question of style as
a tool which enables the historical truth to make its way
to the audience’s consciousness without any covers: ‘If
Solzhenitsyn’s book had no style, no one would have
paid any attention to it. It required its great style to pen-
etrate that gruesome archipelago which – as all of us
knew – exists in ourselves”. Godard and Mieville show
clearly that style does not have to contradict realism,
but it can be a condition necessary for realism to take
on a form which facilitates a more personal and intense
confrontation with reality. The modernist narratives crit-
icized by Huyssen do not exclude the emotional identi-
fication of the viewer with the characters featured on
screen. The cinema of representation language experi-
ments do not have to avoid emotions on principle, it only
makes a different use of them.
With regard to the Holocaust-themed films, Joshua
Hirsch created the term of post-traumatic cinema. In his
opinion, the role of those films is ‘presenting that con-
tent that mimics some aspects of post-traumatic con-
sciousness itself, the attempt to formally reproduce for
the spectator an experience of suddenly seeing the un-
6
6 — thinkable’ . Films about the Holocaust are a substitute
Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: carrier of a real traumatic experience. In order to
Introduction to Film, Trauma and
the Holocaust, Temple University achieve it, however, they must relentlessly go beyond
press, Philadelphia 2004, p. 19 the standard methods of representation of the Holo-
caust so that they do not become established within
conventionalized, familiarized narratives. Initially, as
Hirsch points out, the very images were sufficient to
shock audiences and confront them with the trauma of
the Holocaust; it was unnecessary to set them in a real-
istic or modernist narrative. That phase, in which im-
ages of the Holocaust themselves were a carrier
of traumatic contents, did not last long though. Hirsch

Holocaust and Representation. Notes on three films about the Łódź ghetto 57