3 - Documentary Film and Theater: The Unfinished Business of Archive Work

Summary

THE ARCHIVE has always been a fundamental if contested feature of documentaries about National Socialism and the Holocaust. Films often draw on the footage made by American, British, and Soviet forces when they liberated the camps. The material was used initially in unmediated mode to show what had happened, for example in the Nuremberg Trials, but it has been used subsequently as what Bill Nichols would call a “building block” for other documentaries. Thus, as David Bathrick has argued, not only does the visual archive of the Holocaust serve as an index, testifying to the events that happened in the camps, but also through its repeated circulation, it takes on iconic status. However, the significance of these so-called atrocity films, which were made after the camps had been liberated, has been subject to much scrutiny. The political purpose of these films affected their making and staging, and they therefore require more critical use in a contemporary context. The fact that some of this early footage is among the most widely reused and circulated in Holocaust documentaries has implications for our understanding of these later films.

The visual archive is fundamental to Holocaust documentary because this genre or mode is affected, like other cultural engagements with the Holocaust, by debates about the representability of the camps. Indeed, these debates have been had most forcibly among, and were perhaps defined by, documentary filmmakers. Famously, while Night and Fog by Alain Resnais does make use of archive footage from the camps, Claude Lanzmann has claimed that there is no archive that shows what happens in Auschwitz, and in his own documentary, Shoah, he eschews the use of archive footage. Instead, Lanzmann returns to the site of the camps to interview witnesses from a contemporary perspective. In its use of interviews Shoah also signals a broader shift in Holocaust historiography and memory culture in the 1980s and 1990s away from the historical archive to testimony. Many Holocaust documentaries have used interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. However, the majority feature these alongside documentary footage. As Sven Kramer notes, in this format the witnesses serve to authenticate the archive. As the number of witnesses becomes ever smaller, however, the scope for this kind of dialogue between archive footage and interviews also diminishes.