Page 64 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Time of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Film images.

the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in
Poland encouraged them to write, speak and gather
keepsakes and documents. The Commission began to
look for them in the 1950s, when Czechoslovakia sent
in a question as to whether the Czech children from
Lidice had been imprisoned in the Łódź camp. ‘Dziennik
Łódzki’ [a local daily newspaper] called for information.
That is how it began. The location and history of the
camp were reconstructed on the basis of written and
oral accounts. Later, the documentation vanished, but
several personal questionnaires, referrals and letters
10 — from the children prisoners to their families remained.
Krystyna Garbień, W dziecięcym They were deposited in the ZBoWiD [Association of
kacecie, „Kino” 1970, no.6, p.8
Fighters for Freedom and Democracy] for the Museum
10
of Revolutionary Movement’ .
11 — In view of that fragmentary documentation consist-
Works aimed at commemoration
of the camp at Przemyslowa Street ing of only a few testimonies and accounts, the decision
were undertaken following to make the film seemed obvious. The limited and in-
the research conducted during the complete knowledge about those events was rendered
making of the film. In 1971 the 11
Memorial of Children's Martyrdom, in the audiovisual aspect of the film . ‘The artistic con-
also known as the Broken Heart cept of the film assumes that everything is shown on a
Memorial, was erected. bigger scale, exactly how the adults remembered the
world of their childhood; besides, we concentrate on
12 —
Ibidem, p. 9 filming mostly details and fragments remembered by
the former prisoners, so that the audience can create
an image of the camp and its everyday life in their own
imagination’ – said the cinematographer of The Face of
12
an Angel in an interview .
The evocative sounds and expressive cinematogra-
phy of Chmielewski and Loth’s film abandon the canons
of realistic storytelling but simultaneously imitate what
cannot be pictured or verbalized in a simple way, thus
helping the viewer to build a mental image of events and
internalize the memory of them despite the lack of vi-
sual documentation. In this sense, The Face of an Angel
crosses the boundary between fiction and non-fiction
cinema, becoming a kind of replacement memory – out
of necessity – utilizing the representation strategies of
fiction cinema, although not in order to create an illusion
of a complete testimony and consistent narrative, but
to prevent it falling into oblivion.
A particular marriage of non-fiction cinema and sto-
rytelling techniques characteristic to realistic narratives
can be found in a poetic documentary, Z głębokości
wołam [From the depths I call] (2005) by Wojciech

62 Bartosz Zając