Page 72 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Time of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Film images.

Since the 1990s, it is the archival photographs
– and not the excerpts from documents like Dawid
Sierakowiak’s Diary or The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto
– which more and more often and clearly become not
only a material, but also a starting point for an atypical
film aesthetics. I want to emphasize that it is the photo-
graphs in themselves and not the film footage or a film
frame. Because of that we can feel their compositional
completeness and statics – which film directors often
tend to break by focusing the camera on a chosen detail
or creating movement to simulate a changeable direc-
tion of attention in an open space in a macrophoto-
graphic view. Those are classic techniques of feature
cinema, aimed at an imaginatory transfer of the viewer
into the image presented in the photograph. Such sto-
rytelling tricks deprive the pictures of something impor-
tant, but simultaneously grant them something else.
They animate the pictured figures and endow them with
a kind of ‘super-presence’, whereas the stillness of the
pictures and a primary feeling of separation from the
pictured scene vanish. In other words, it is about creat-
ing a certain ‘structure of feeling’, as Raymond Williams
put it, with the methods used in fiction cinema. The
structure of feeling brings us closer to the pictured fig-
ures and helps to remove from our field of view the his-
torical and compositional frame, which by definition
situates us outside of that world as replacement wit-
nesses, who – although present and observing – are
not contemporary with the pictures and therefore do not
belong there.
A fictitious, though not yet hallucinatory situation,
combining eye witnessing and ‘being there’ is created,
I must emphasize, more thanks to the narrative and cin-
ematic method of reading the photographs with the
camera than to the photographs themselves. In Photog-
rapher [Fotoamator] (1998), the colour photographs
made by Walter Genewein, the Nazi bookkeeper of the
ghetto administration, found in 1987, are rarely shown
as a material object in form of a framed celluloid pic-
ture. More often than not they are cropped and trans-
formed into the form of a long take (changing mode of
cropping of movements, simulation of shooting the ob-
jects first in close-up, half close-up or long shot, and
then in a travelling shot, as if to explore the space of the

70 Tomasz Majewski