tilm and the llolocaust Annette lnsdort

tilm
and the llolocaust
Ihird tdition
Annette lnsdort
C,qrvrnnrDGE
PRESS
UNTVERSITY
' 1"t
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDIC.^TE OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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Dedicated to the
Kingdom
Memory of My Fatheç
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@
and of My Mother-in-Law,
Regina Berman Toporek
A¡nette Insdorf, 19g3, 19g9, 2OO2,2OO3
Foreword ro 1989 edition O Elie Wiesel
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing
agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place withoui
the written permission of Cambridge ûniversity press.
First edition published l9g3 by Random House
Second edition published l9g9 by Cambridge University press
Reprinted 1990
Third edition first published 2003
Printed in the United States of America
TypefacesMiniont}ll2pt.and Univers6T Systemßfg.2s
[TBl
A catalog
record
for
this book is available
from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in publication Data
Insdorf, Annette.
Indelible shadows : fi.lm and the Holocaust / Annette
Insdorf. _ 3rd ed.
P.; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-s2l-8ts63-0 - ISBN 0-s2l-01630_a (pb.)
l. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion
þicíures. L Title.
PNl99s.9.Hs3Is7
2oo2
791.43',658-dc27
2002023793
ISBN 0 521 81563 0 hardback
ISBN 0 521 01630 4paperback
\^.
Meaningful Montage
Finding an Appropriate Language
36
an extreme close-up of Sophie's face, tremulous and slightly inebriated, reminding
the viewer ofwhose subjective version of the past is being reenacted. Andbyworking
with Almendros for polished but unselfconscious images, he permitted Streep's face
to become an exquisitely expressive landscape. Even the casting process - which took
almost two years - attests to Pakula's sensitive decision making: he searched for an
Eastern European actress who would be physically and linguistically right, and his assistant, Doug Wick, scoured Europe to find potential performers. He eventually came
It is no surprise that one of the films
Pakula studied while writing the script for
These are the storehouses of the Nazis at war,
nothing but women's hair ' . .
At fifteen pennies Per kilo. . .
reflects and elicits tension. whether the counterpoint is between image and sound,
past and present, stasis and movement, despair and hope, black-and-white and color,
or oblivion and memor¡ Resnais's film addresses the audience's intelligence - and
moves beyond a facile stimulation of helpless tears. As François Tiuffaut pointed out:
It
t calm
It is used for cloth.
With the bones.
.
.
fertilizer. At least theY try.
With the bodies. . . but no more can be said ' '
With the bodies, theY trY to make . . .
almost impossible to speak about this ñlm in the vocabulary ofcinematic criticism.
is not a documentar¡ or an indictment, or a poem, but a meditation on the most
is
important phenomenon of the nventieth century. . . . The power of this film.
seems to denY its
photographs.
At these moments, the voice (of actor Michel Bouquet) quietþ recalls, probes'
offers statistics, and bears witness - all with an admirable lack of emotionalism'
sophie's choicewas Night and Fog still the most powerfirl film on the concentration
camp experience. DirectedbyAlain Resnais in 1955, Night øndFogisafilm whosevery
shape challenges existing visual language, mainly through an editing style that both
It
ceful landscaPe in color.
bY survivor Jean CaYrol'
As
int
upon a young actress named Magda Vasaryova, but in the meantime, An drzejWajda
had suggested to Pakula an actress he had directed at the Yale Repertory Theater
a few years before: Meryl Streep. Pakula waited for her to complete filming of
The French Lieutenant's Woman and then waited a few more months as she took
Polish lessons. (For the French release, Streep even insisted on doing her own dubbing,
studying tapes of Polish-accented French.)
The resulting frlm has been questioned - by EIie Wiesel, among others3 - but
more because of the moral discomfort inherent in the novel's premise than for the
film itself: it universalizes the Holocaust by eliciting sympathy for a survivor in the
form of a "lying Polish shiksa" who happened to be beautifril and multilingual enough
to live through Auschwitz - as opposed to a heroine who would have been fewish
or in the Resistance. others have asked whether it is proper to use the Holocaust as
a backdrop for Stingo's coming of age (obviously as Styrons mouthpiece). To the
degree that people who never had contact with the Holocaust should know about
it if they are to grow into civilized and lucid beings, it seems right that Sophie's
Choice is Stingo's story. The film acknowledges that it is on-ly the survivor who can
recount the horrors of Auschwitz, but that it requires an outsider's sympathetic
understanding and chronicling ability to give the recollections universal significance
and immortality. More than in The Pawnbroker or High Street, the survivor succeeds
in transmitting her tale and - at least temporarily- in overcoming her guilt. Pakula
offers us a continually close-up and consequently sympathetic view of Sophie,
and despite his distanced style, one senses that he added a personal dimension to
the story of Stingo-Styron: As he told the New York Times, "My father was a polish
Jew. If he hadn't come to this countr¡ Sophie's story could have been my own."a
37
'
soap.
. . is
rooted in its tone, the terrible gentleness.. . . When we have looked at these strange,
seventy-pound slave laborers, we understand that we're not going to "feel better" after
seeing Nuir er Brouillard; quite the opposite.s
As for the skin. .
.6
The accompanying images render further narration superfluous'
A
Finding an Appropriate Language
revelatorycame
picture.
black-and-white photos, and
Resnais's
past to complete the
Meaningful Montage
39
testimonyfrom the
brutally defrned by
tracks coveredwith
green grass into sputtering newsreels of transports. The "picture postcard" becomes
a stark nightmare, as Night and Fog asswes the function of an X-ray: through the
spine of documentary footage and Cayrol's calmly vigilant meditation, we are forced
to
see
the deformities hidden from the unaided eye (and camera), and to struggle
?n
against the imperturbability of surfaces. "who is responsible?" asks the narrator, after
a wordless presentation of soap and lampshades made from human skin.
The alternation of
for those during World
who are responsible fo
the narrator insists:
one
of
from ours? . . We look
dead under the debris . .
War slumbers, with
observatory to warn
.
hty, whether
r those today
deceptive, as
tches over this strange
r faces really diffe¡ent
n camp monster were
happened in one time
and one place, and who do not think to look around us, or hear the endless cry.
David Drach (Michel) and
Marie-losé Nat (Mother) in Ies
Violons du bal.
Night and Fog fulfills what the critic and filmmaker Eric Rohmer once said about
Resnais - that he is a cubist because he reconstitutes reality after fragmenting it. The
effect is not only opposition, but a deeper unity in which past and present blend
PHOTO COURTESY OF
into each other.
LEVITT-PICKMAN FILM
CORPORATION
(literally "The Violins of the Ball" but released in the United. States
under its French title) reverses part ofthe v
Fogby shooting
present-day scenes in black-and-white, a
s is a revealing
decision on the part of filmmaker Michel
s memories are
more vibrantly compelling than his contemporary existence. In this 1973 movie,
ur-year-old French director attempting to make an
family's struggle for survival during the Occupation.
ine-year-old son David as himself in 1939, and his
e idea to a weighty
project "Nobody's
Les Violons du bal
fiIm." A deft piece of editing solves the problem: Drach momentarily bows his head
in frustration under his notebook, and the face that reappears is that ofJean-Louis
Drach and
Tiintignant
Tiintignant
backwardo
or, walking
naParallel
escalator, Drach hands Tiintignant the key to his apartment. Multiple mirrors give
of the screen
the impression that the two figures
converge
ard'
before Drach gets offthe escalator - Ieaving Tr
939, in which
Les Violons du balproceeds into sustained
Michel, his mother, grandmother, brother ]ean (Christian Rist), and sister Nathalie
(Nathalie Roussel) are uprooted and forced to leave Paris. Lighthearted and affluent,
bsessively continues
(Gabrielle Doulcet)
emerging from the Metro at the cirque d'Hiver; a few sequences later, in the frlm's
past tense, this woman will play his grandmother.
The degree to which the director's imagination colors and overtakes the present
is shown in the circus itself. As his wife does her spinning act, black-and-white
occasionally yields to color, reflecting Drach's subjective vision. The color persists
as we then see the
little boy Michet in the circus. Similarl¡ while Drach rides a
motorcycle through contemporary Paris, he passes a big old car and stares at it
e war, driven by his wife/mother.
d by color fading gently in and
three refugees on their own to make a run for the border. Losing all their possessions
along the wa¡ they succeed in slipping through the fence just before German bullets
enthusiasm, however, does not
infect the producer, who continues to shrug at his material and insists, "No stars, no
can reach them.
1
Notes to Pages 6-36
). JohnJ.o'connoç"DiverseviewsofNaziGermany," NewYorkTimes(ArtsandLeisure),
t
I.
sPeeches:
when I
at a meeting of the
,
was vividly reminiscent of Lawson's pitch.
2. This is alio in line with Hans-frirgen Syberberg's view
Our
mad
rush
that
half-cried address
to be found in L'Avant-Scéne
3
p. 31,
Dan Yakir, "Bad Guys Never Looked so Good," New York Post, August 6, 1981,
of the
Eye
and
Arls
Lost
the
of
Raiders
on the "honorabte" Nazis of Victory, Lili Marleen,
See
Neeàle.
(February 15' f961): 51-54'
Styles ofTension
Canetti's "intriguing
currenryinthe 1920s'
seen a hundred thous
for bus tickets, ordinary men lost all perc
numbers tainted with unreality the disap
steiner,
bY Steve Wasserman'
p.454.
I
1'ThescenebringstomindGeorgeSteiner,slnBluebeard,sCastle,wherehediscussesElias
of the Fùhrer, as presented in
aker of all times' He
in order to view the
that the onlY objects
"Filmmaker as Pariah," ViIIage Voice' January 14' 1980, p' 29 '
1980),
3. Pauline KaeI, When the Lights Go Down (New York Holt, Rinehart & winston,
4.
6.ThisandthefollowingquotationfromNuitetbrouillardaretakenfromthecompletetext
.,A
Season
Towards
ln uettl, in in Bluebeard's castle: some Notes
197t), P'
the Redefnition
5r'
rk:Atheneum' 1966)'p' 123' Corroboration
ers can be found in the Belgian documentary'
2.
"the Nazi vans'"
If It Were Yesterday,where a priest recalls
4116l
September 18, 1961, published in Film
3. From a conversation with stefania Beylin,
1964 Cannes Film Festival'
and reprinted in the press book for the
(October 25' 1988)'
VillageVoice
P"td'
"Out
the
of
¿. irráUi.-"n,
As
4
l.
Black Humor
chøplin (Paris: Les Editions du cerf' 1972)'
André Bazin and Eric Rohmer, charlie
pp.28-32.
2.HermanG.Weinberg,TheLubitschTozch(NewYork:DoverPublications,|977),p.247.
3. Ibid., P. 17s.
1942'
.6.
17.
4. James Shelley Hamilt on in The National Board
5. Weinberg' P. 247.
6. Kael, When the Lights Go Down' p' 139'
t8.
of Review magaztne'March
7.
19.
20.
e
of us all"
housing in the cities of concentration.
-."
p.117).
21
13, 1982, P. 10.
s
instead to
'war and Remembrance I " New York Times (Arts and
Leisure), November 6, 1988' P. 31.
2. )anetMaslin,"Bringing'sophie'schoice'totheScreen,"NewYorkTimes(ArtsandLeisure),
¡.
4.
May 9, 1982, PP. 1, 15.
New York Times (Arts and
Elie wiesel, "Dães the Holocaust Lie beyond the Reach of Art?'"
Leisure), April 17, 1983' PP. 1' 12.
"
York Times,July 22'
Aljean Harmetz, "Miss Streep and Kline cast in Movie 'sophie,' New
1981, p. C21.
(New York Simon &
5. Françåis Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew
Schuster, 1978), P. 303.
.,w..,-urJ. o.. orp"roay
und displacement"
as keys
to
Beauties.
8.QuotedinMartinEsslin,TheTheatreoftheAbsurd(NewYork:AnchorBooks'1961)'
p. r33.
2
Meaningful Montage
(April 1982): ix
1. Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Les choix de Pakula," cahiers du cinêma 23
(my translation).
Ï:*:1
the idea of art as criticism of life'b"t tather
clingstotheRomanticnotionthattheprotagonist,simplybyvirtueofoccupyingcenter
stage,carriestheendorsementoftheartistandaudience..."(p.636).DesPrespoints
understanding seven
TV Guide,February
îohn Toland, "Can TV Dramas Convey the Horrors of the Holocaust?"
22. NjeanHarmetz, "waging wouk
(P.275)
critique ín Social
how Bettelheim
(New York Holt, Rinehart & winston' 1975'
image
5
The Jew as Ghild
l.JudithDoneson,..TheJewasaFemaleFigureinHolocaustFilm],Shoahl,no.1,p.ll.
Books'
France and the Jews (New York Basic
2. Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus' Vichy
Iune l, 1981'
1981). See
PP.
"a""";';ì.hy ãcfo*"i
rr2-r28.
les juifs"' Le Nouvel observateur,
example, the pernicious reportage-by Robert
out to me
September 30,I94I,pp' 59-60' It 1as al1 lointed
was the vic
France
1943
in
film
poput"t
th"
Gauteur that
-oti
4. Doneson, PP-12-13'
¡. iä., fo,
de