Page 73 - Centrum Dialogu im. Marka Edelmana w Łodzi. Time of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Film images.

A still from Photographer image) or animated by merging and other ‘soft’ editing
[Fotoamator] techniques.
directed by Dariusz Jabłoński, All this, combined with the sounds of the streets,
1998 – courtesy
of Apple Film Production trams and human voices is supposed to deprive the im-
ages of their static, or ‘dead’ character. Such a framing
method engages the audience (with a moving picture,
which moves the mind and body of the viewer) and re-
duces the feeling of alienation and stillness of the pic-
tures. However, it is those reduced features which
absorb us, though in a different way than in a cinematic
reading; our attention is drawn to those small pictures
so strongly that sometimes we wish we could look away
– or, on the contrary, we activate our reserves of atten-
tion and ‘patience techniques’.
Animation of Genewein’s colour slides juxtaposed
against the black-and-white, mute images of Łódź of the
1990s is justified in the film’s construction through the
montage of documents which constitute a personal
commentary: private and business correspondence, of-
ficial reports are read as a voice-over to bring the audi-
ence closer to the mind of the photographer. In the face
of the tragedy of the ghetto Walter Genewein is worried
only about the technical quality of his photographs,
which transform the ghetto into an idyllic advertisement

Litzmannstadt Ghetto – Affective Memory, Photography and Music 71