Conclusion
The three documentaries discussed in this chapter all embark on a hazardous journey. Each addresses violent events that have long been repressed, both psychologically and politically.
In the wake of such histories, the documentary filmmaker may seem to be shouldered with the task of representing and reconstructing, of filling in the blanks in the history books, and of unearthing long-buried memories of unfathomable cruelty. In North America and Europe, debates about the Holocaust in the postwar period often pivoted on the duty to reestablish the truths of historical violence. Such a task has often come with a recognition that conventional modes of representation fall short in the face of unspeakable horrors. In his introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, Saul Friedlander points to a widely shared belief that the Holocaust is best represented through an “allusive or distanced realism [...] which leaves the unsayable unsaid” (1992, p. 17). This mode of representation (to which literature and art are often thought to have privileged access) expresses a belief that histories of mass violence simultaneously demand and elude understanding.Folman, Oppenheimer, and Panh have obviously been influenced by these arguments, yet their approaches are not burdened with the epistemological and ethical orthodoxies that so often inform debates about Holocaust representation. Instead of working with an “allusive or distanced realism,” they address historical horrors in a style that is at once direct and imaginative. In their films, reenactment erodes the distance that directors, subjects, or spectators may hope to maintain to the histories addressed, opening upembodied and affective connections to the past. Moreover, the frequent overlap in all three documentaries, between dramatic or cinematic reenactment on the one hand, and traumatic repetition on the other, further prob- lematizes the temporal distance to the historical events invoked.
While undermining temporal and emotional detachment, the films simultaneously violate the deep-seated expectation that documentary film provides immediate access to the real. Waltz with Bashir, The Act of Killing, and The Missing Picture self-consciously exhibit their imaginative and performative recreations of historical reality.
Consequently, when measured against the ideal of truthfulness and literality (invoked in Nick Fraser’s review of The Act of Killing [2013]), they may appear worthless, even blasphemous. However, if one follows Stella Bruzzi’s argument that documentary is “a perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation” (2006, p. 13), it becomes clear that these films exacerbate and highlight, in a self-reflective way, the performative element that is always already at the basis of the genre. Importantly, in the films discussed here, this performativity is never an instance of gratuitous postmodern self-doubt and meta-discourse. In the wake of incomprehensibly cruel events, the question of how best to represent history, and consequently how to make sense of it, is of acute relevance—to individual victims, to bystanders, and perpetrators, and to their larger communities.We may now see how Waltz with Bashir, The Act ofKilling, and The Missing Picture are not simply to be measured within a paradigm of representation and its oft-invoked cognates: accuracy, immediacy, and objectivity. Instead, they hinge on the performative, that is, they do rather than show: these documentaries enact representation’s difficulties, explore memory’s workings, and chart reenactment’s effects. And most importantly, in doing so, they implicate subjects, directors, and spectators in the pasts they confront.
More on the topic Conclusion:
- Conclusions
- Western and Central Eurasia
- Industrious revolutions in early modern world history
- Early polities of the Western Sudan
- Tiwanaku urban origins: distributed centers and animate landscapes