Visualizing Polish Holocaust Memory

• In Event: Filming Anxious Memories and the Fate of the Jews

Abstract

My paper focuses on three recent acclaimed and controversial Polish films and how they intervene in debates about national forms of Holocaust commemoration. I argue that these films use the visual techniques of German Expressionist art and film to convey a troubled quest for a Polish Holocaust memory without Jews. Significantly, the visual ambiguities of these films challenge the construction of Polish Holocaust memory that feature Poles as “victims of history” (Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust, 2012). Aftermath (2012), directed by Wladyslaw Pasikowski and influenced by Jan Gross’s Neighbors, transforms the 1941 Polish massacre of Jews in Jedwabne into a critical relationship between two Polish brothers and their nation’s troubled Holocaust past and memory. With no Jewish characters, the film juxtaposes the heightened coloration of Expressionist art and the shadows of Expressionist film to depict the brothers as embodying both the burial and exhumation of an unresolved, apparitional national tragedy.
Ida (2013), directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is set in 1962 Poland when Communist ideology encouraged repression of the nation’s role in the Holocaust. Ida depicts a painful journey to discover the Holocaust past which, like its Jewish victims, has been buried beneath layers of repressed memory by the subsuming forces of traditional Polish religious and political ideology and practice. Filmed in shadowy grays, with claustrophobic spaces denoting ideological and political suppression, the film visualizes Polish Holocaust memory as traumatically conflicted about the erasure and expulsion of Jewish identity in Poland. Demon (2015), directed by Marcin Wrona, represents the haunting of Polish memory by traces of murdered Jews and recalcitrant antisemitism. Like the Expressionist spaces and shadows of Aftermath and Ida , Demon also recalls the 1937 silent Polish film based on S-Anski’s tale, The Dybbuk. My interdisciplinary approach to visual representation will show how these films extend the concept of posttraumatic cinema as developed in Joshua Hirsch’s Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust by revealing how the ghost of Poland’s lost Jews haunts the possibility of regenerating contemporary Polish culture.

Author

• Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University