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Tracing Shoah

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert Brinkley  and
Steven Youra
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Abstract

It is often said that the Shoah cannot be represented. But viewers can learn from Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah how the events referred to as the Shoah produce a reference to themselves. The film presents a montage of encounters, of unanticipated details discovered in filming, of instances selected and arranged as openings to other encounters not included in Shoah. Through careful choreography, the film invites the return of signs from the past. Shoah offers a way of seeing and invites encounters that—like the filmmaker's arrangements—are open to the force of evidence as that evidence constrains interpretative response. Lanzmann's stance, an openness to significance that precedes interpretation, provides a model for a viewer's relationship to Shoah and its material, to the otherness that addresses the audience through the film. In tracing what can be traced and in filming what can be witnessed, Shoah can turn spectators into producers in the work of bearing witness.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 111 , Issue 1: Special Topic The Status of Evidence , January 1996 , pp. 108 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1996

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