Page 71 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Time of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Film images.

Litzmannstadt Ghetto – Affective Memory,

Photography and Music

— Tomasz Majewski

Henryk Ross, one of the ghetto The poetics of documentary films about the Łódź ghetto
photographers, employed is in many respects typical for the non-fiction cinema
in the Statistics Department. dedicated to the Holocaust and mirrors its changes
Photo courtesy of the State
Archive in Łódź within the last few decades. The early productions, be-
ginning with those of the1960s, were dominated by his-
torical commentary which created the film narrative,
either in an emotional or exalted tone, like Daniel
Szylit’s Litzmannstadt Getto (1965) or in a descriptive
and factual form, like Chaim Rumkowski and the Jews
of Lodz (1982), where the word prevails over the visual
material. Simultaneously, the voice-over characteristic
of the explanative tone of documentaries is what the
presented photographs do not hold (or what is ‘beyond’
the photographs); it supplements or negates what we
see, thus symbolizing a kind of knowledge inaccessible
to the ghetto victims. In relation to the time the pictures
were taken and the knowledge of the people they de-
pict, the commentary anticipates, as it were, what
1 — comes next . From the 1990s onwards, documentary
1
Bill Nichols, Typy filmu
dokumentalnego, [in:] Metody productions have often featured accounts of the sur-
dokumentalne w filmie, vivors, who in front of a hypothetic court of justice would
red. D. Rode, M. Pieńkowski, perform the role of both an eye witness (the Latin testes)
Łódź 2013, pp. 19-22.
and partly that of a victim on whom evidence is being
given by others. Archival photographs more and more
often serve as keypoints of the film narrative, since their
meaning exceeds that of mere illustration of the wit-
nesses’ reports or testimonies included in the parame-
ters of an objective commentary. In this article I would
like to discuss photography and music as forms of af-
fective memory and the change of their status in the
documentary films dedicated to the Łódź ghetto.

Litzmannstadt Ghetto – Affective Memory, Photography and Music 69