Joshua Hirsch. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. xvi + 213 pp. $66.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59213-208-9.
Reviewed by Heike Polster (Department of Foreign Languages, University of Memphis)
Published on H-German (October, 2006)
Film as Vicarious Trauma
Although he defines the "posttraumatic" as a phase of historical awareness, one not necessarily tied up with the events and outcome of the war years, Joshua Hirsch broadens the notion of the "posttraumatic" to--first and foremost--understand it as an expression of and for the relationship between form and content of an artwork, and thus as a "voluntary aesthetic" (p. 20). In this successful attempt to apply trauma theory to culture, Hirsch offers a conclusive theory of posttraumatic film by exploring the manner in which the confrontation between cinema and the Holocaust has taken shape in a number of documentary and fiction films. The author focuses on specific problems the Holocaust created for the cinematic representation of history and considers what kind of opportunities cinema creates for the representation of the Holocaust. Hirsch is especially interested in films that locate themselves on the boundary between avant-garde and mainstream cinema: films that used the cultural and narrative techniques of modernism "as a way of provoking a posttraumatic historical consciousness of the Holocaust" (p. xi).
In his persuasive introduction, Hirsch explains that film can be understood in terms of "vicarious trauma," as it formally imitates and engages the experience of processing what has been witnessed through mental images, memory, imagination and dreams. According to Hirsch, cinema constitutes a kind of witnessing to two complementary and contradictory senses. On the one hand, cinema bears witness to the outer, physical reality of historical events; on the other, it can show the inner, psychological reality of the effects of those events on people (p. 7). Thus, drawing from psychological theory, intellectual history and poststructuralist literary criticism, Hirsch uses the concept of trauma to outline the "crisis of representation" brought on by the Holocaust. Necessary, but not sufficient to explain this crisis exhaustively, explains Hirsch, trauma theory nevertheless accounts for five aspects of the crisis. Hirsch's selection of films takes up the task of considering all five aspects, and not only the single aspects of trauma: he identifies a broad problem of representing the past, as well as the deforming effects of pain on representation. Using Freud's theory as a starting point, Hirsch directs his attention to the specific type of haunting by past pain known as trauma. He further points to a dimension of trauma very specific to massive human-inflicted violence, and, in quoting Maurice Blanchot, underlines "the annihilation of the annihilation," that is, the Nazis' nearly successful attempt to erase traces of the genocide, as an aspect of the crisis of representation that successful films will address (p. 11).
Hirsch successfully reframes the idea of the limits of Holocaust representation through an investigation of the meta-psychological structures and formal conventions of discourse. He systematically lays out that understanding in relation to the cinema. By borrowing Gerard Genette's method from Narrative Discourse (1980) and adapting this model to historical films, Hirsch marks tense as the regulation of the "relations between the temporality of the film text (screen time) and the temporality of the historical events represented by the film (as well as, in the case of documentary, the temporality of the filmic evidence, e.g., concentration camp footage)" (p. 20). Mood, he states, regulates "the point of view of the film on the images and events represented. And voice regulates the film's self-consciousness of its own act of narration" (p. 20).
Hirsch locates the origin of posttraumatic narration in the shock of wartime footage. He focuses on a group of essential documentary and fiction films that were central to the proliferation of this cinematic form across various nations and genres. Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955), according to the author, constitutes the "founding text of posttraumatic cinema," while at the same time acting as an important precursor of the French New Wave (p. 41). In his discussion of Night and Fog, Hirsch outlines the origins of posttraumatic cinema within the cultural and historical moment: In France, where the film was made, it combated the repression of the memory of the camps and simultaneously contributed to the repression of the memory of the Jewish genocide. The author observes that Night and Fog, in displaying a two-fold dynamic, contributed to a "new discourse of historical trauma through the content of its form" (p. 31). Casting a closer look at the film's form, Hirsch terms its techniques--reflexive, modernist and poetic--to be those of compilation film rather than those of the discourse of atrocity as it was used in traditional documentaries.
Hirsch identifies a "montage theory of memory" in Resnais's treatment of artifacts as catalysts, as well as the film's structure, in which the failure of traumatic memory is staged through a filmic appropriation of the dialectic of forgetting and repetition. By comparing the film with Mein Kampf (1960) and The Death Camps (1945), he investigates the manner in which atrocity footage is narrativized. He considers the matter of which changes in documentary film-making were brought about by cinema vérité (culminating in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah [1985]) and identifies numerous aspects of the development of a meta-historical discourse. Hirsch then addresses the appearance of a fictional posttraumatic cinema, and traces its development through the vivid flashbacks in Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) to the portrayal of memory and pain in The Pawnbroker (1965). Hirsch claims that the posttraumatic flashback's shock value decreased as it "had entered the narrative repertoire of mainstream film" (p. 110). Thus, "this cinematic analogue for psychological and historical experience became a fixture in the Western cultural landscape" (p. 110).
The fifth chapter of Hirsch's book extracts a posttraumatic autobiography in three early films by István Szabó. Through a close reading of a flashback sequence in Love Film (1970), the author casts a closer look at the narrative structure and its complex temporal montage. In an exemplary analysis, Hirsch connects the film's representation of associative memory with a Proustian transformation of memory "from a bracketed plot device into the basic mode of narration" (p. 131). In his final chapter, Hirsch examines the effects of postmodernism on posttraumatic cinema, looking at Schindler's List (1993) and a work about a different form of historical trauma, History and Memory (1991), a videotape dealing with the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. In this chapter, Hirsch uses Hal Foster's term, "reactionary" postmodernism, to distinguish between Schindler's List's repudiation of the critical energies of modernism and its celebration of the status quo, and History and Memory, which he claims displays "resistant" postmodernism in that it extends modernism's critical energies in an altered form, "while repudiating certain of its elitist postwar developments" (p. 141).
Afterimage will be useful for film scholars and literary scholars for its detailed analysis of narrative techniques. The author's critical summary of trauma theory in the introduction familiarizes the reader with the prevalent terminology, while offering a persuasive argument for and approach to reading films as texts. Hirsch's book delivers a compelling study of creative techniques used by a number of postwar filmmakers to respond to the crisis of representation that the Holocaust brought about, while making the term "posttraumatic" applicable and useful for many other personal and historical experiences.
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Citation:
Heike Polster. Review of Hirsch, Joshua, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12395
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