Film and Genocide PDF
Preview Film and Genocide
Film and Genocide Film and Genocide Edited by kristi m. wilson and tomás f. crowder-taraborrelli The University of Wisconsin Press Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through support from the Anonymous Fundof the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059 uwpress.wisc.edu 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2012 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Film and genocide / edited by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás F. Crowder-Taraborrelli. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-299-28564-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-299-28563-0 (e-book) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in motion pictures. 2. Genocide—In motion pictures. 3. Motion picture producers and directors—Interviews. I. Wilson, Kristi M. II. Crowder-Taraborrelli, Tomás F. PN1995.9.H53F55 2012 791.43´658405318—dc23 2011017751 Contents vii Preface 3 Introduction Part I: Atrocities, Spectatorship, and Memory 21 1. Film and Atrocity: The Holocaust as Spectacle sophia wood 45 2. Documenting the Holocaust in Orson Welles’s The Stranger jennifer l. barker 3. Remembering Revolution after Ruin and Genocide: Recent 67 Chilean Documentary Films and the Writing of History michael j. lazzara 4. “The Power to Imagine”: Genocide, Exile, and Ethical Memory 87 in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat georgiana banita Part II: Coloniality and Postcoloniality 5. Massacre and the Movies: Soldier Blueand the Sand 109 Creek Massacre of 1864 paul r. bartrop 6. The Other in Genocide: Responsibility and Benevolence 122 in Rabbit-Proof Fence donna-lee frieze v contents 7. Genres of “Yet An Other Genocide”: Cinematic 133 Representations of Rwanda madelaine hron Part III: Visual Documentation and Genocide 157 8. The Specter of Genocide in Errol Morris’s The Fog of War kristi m. wilson 9. GIs Documenting Genocide: Amateur Films of World 170 War II Concentration Camps marsha orgeron 10. Through the Open Society Archives to The Portraitist: 187 Film’s Impulse toward Death and Witness stephen cooper Part IV: Interviews 205 11. Greg Barker, Director of Ghosts of Rwanda (2004) richard o’connell Interviewed by 217 12. Nick Hughes, Director of 100 Days(2001) piotr a. cieplak Interviewed by 228 13. Irek Dobrowolski, Director of The Portraitist(2005) stephen cooper Interviewed by 237 Filmography 241 Bibliography 255 Contributors 259 Index vi Preface In fact, at the end of the day I believe that people do want to know when there is some major tragedy going on, when there is some unacceptable situation happening in this world. And they want something to be done about it. That’s what I believe. james nachtwey, in War Photographer In recognizing our ability to identify with characters, whether Jewish, German, Kapo, or Communist, we move one step closer to guarding against that which permitted the Holocaust to develop—indifference. Perhaps the beam cast by film projectors can pierce the continuing willed blindness. annette insdorf,Indelible Shadows The idea for this collection began in Buenos Aires as we were researching documen- tary films about genocide in Latin America during the cold war (referred to as Operation Condor) at the 2007 Second International Meeting for the Analysis of the Social Practices of Genocide.1 During the week-long conference, we toured the infamous ESMA (The Naval Mechanics School) detention center with Daniel Feierstein, Director of the Center for Genocide Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Tres Febrero, Argentina, and heard presentations on topics such as post-genocide Bosnia, the Armenian diaspora in Mexico and public commemoration of the Armenian genocide, the figure of the disappeared person in Argentine cinema and poetry, and resistance to genocidal practices, among others. We noticed, in particular, that leading academics frequently referred to the Holocaust in the hopes of deter- mining patterns in more contemporary, state-sponsored atrocities. The group of scholars, comprised primarily of historians and sociologists, also made passing vii preface references to well-known films, such as Schindler’s List(1993) and Hotel Rwanda (2004), and suggested that these films spoke to the phenomenon of genocide in a way that a book could not. In fact, genocide studies has, from its inception, been largely interdisciplinary, incorporating philosophy, literature, theater, and psychology, to name a few approaches. Pioneering genocide scholar Israel W. Charny claimed that the principles of interdisciplinary and ecumenical thinking were central to his work from the outset: “We included psychiatrists and psychologists, educators from the primary level to the collegiate, a rabbi who was also a philosopher and a fine novelist, and a director of theater. ... The theater director and I, in turn, worked on a project of how to present in the media information about human rights abuses in ways which could help audiences to maintain their involvement rather than turn off their attention with a sense of helplessness.”2As Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian point out, Charny’s approach to understanding genocide is not only interdisciplinary but also unusually broad and inclusive, leaving it open to criticism on the grounds that it lacks theoretical rigor. As Chorbajian points out, however, “it is important to recognize our current state of theorizing about genocide as the product of a recent, incomplete and evolving process as well as a contested one.”3Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan indicate a rise in the study of the Holocaust in the last two decades, as well as a parallel increase in the study of a variety of mass murder and human rights abuse cases.4 In several recent cross-cultural, comparatist books on genocide, such as Alexander Laban Hinton’s and Kevin Lewis O’Neill’s edited collection Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation; Adam Jones’s Genocide: A Comprehensive Introductionand Evoking Genocide; and Robert Skloot’s The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia, rep- resentation plays a fundamental role. Formally incorporating film and photography into genocide studies is a natural next step in the evolution of the field. While we recognize the dangers of oversimplification and trivialization, we have opted for a generally inclusive approach with respect to definitions because we feel that it best represents the type of dialogue and debate that already exists in many films about genocide and in theoretical discussions thereof. A series of difficult questions arose when we first began research for this project: Can film and the power of the image say something about the unspeakable horrors of genocide that literature cannot? How do we determine what is an effective genocide film? Should a film about genocide attempt to determine the factors that led to the atrocities or focus on an individual’s plight as a window into the lives of other victims? Can films reach wider audiences faster and appeal to their core emotions so that they will act? Or should film be considered just supplementary viii Preface material to other sources of knowledge, such as photographs, history books, poems, or victims’ testimony? Ilan Avisar echoes the thoughts of a sector of film scholars who put their faith in the power of the cinematic image to penetrate the protective consciousness of the spectator, awakening moral outrage and disarming passivity through the physical experience of viewing a film: “Theoretically cinema has an advantage over literature in the quest for realism. Compared with words, the photographic image is a better means of objective representation and has a stronger immediate and sensuous impact on the viewer.”5Others suggest further, that filmic representa- tions of the Holocaust may impact how we study questions of ethics, evil, and genocide in this century.6 The authors in this collection address the way in which several films confront the problems of memory and identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in landscapes marked by genocide and its resultant forms of trauma. These chapters explore the often controversial construction and arrangement of memory, touching on such topics as the relationship between memories passed down by family members, the adaptation of survivors’ tales in literary and film genres, the extraordi- nary ability of film to mimic the process of working through trauma and its subsequent demands on spectators, and the confrontation between memory and physical remains. M any people have supported this project over the years as we worked between Buenos Aires and California. We would like to thank our contributors especially for their dedication and commitment to the collection. Carlos Castresana, Spanish court magistrate, prosecutor, and the coauthor of the formal complaint against Augusto Pinochet, along with Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, encouraged our fledgling forays into the field of genocide studies and crimes against humanity at the conference we organized on international criminal law at Stanford University in 2007. We owe a great deal of thanks to the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) Program at Stanford University. Professor Russell Berman and IHUM Director Ellen Woods lent us research support and an academic forum for debate and the exchange of ideas. We are also indebted to Soka University of America for a research leave and, in particular, to Professors Jay Heffron and William L. Ascher for awarding us a Pacific Basin Research Fund Grant to work on summer research for this anthology. We would also like to thank filmmakers Greg Barker and Nick Hughes, and Wojciech Plosa, Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Archives, all of whom provided photos for this book. Our research assistants, January Coleman-Jones and Jake Nevrla, helped us immensely with the manuscript ix
The list of books you might like
