I am going to talk about Shoah, I decided this last night at the screening. In Raul Hilberg's discourse he establishes that the mechanized process of destruction which intended a final solution gave the Nazi's, "an authorization to invent...to begin something that as of yet ha[d] been incapable of being put into words: to leave it up to their imagination." The mechanism of the camera repeats and undoes the process of mechanized destruction by processes of filmic re-construction. Throughout Shoah many of the events are left up to the imagination and are relayed by shared narratives mixed with contemporary images of people and places with sometimes contradictory or parallel content. When the old man is sitting on the bench at the train station telling the story of the construction of a camp the camera moves through a quiet and serene landscape. He speaks of construction, workers and the enclosure of spaces but the camera moves quickly over an empty open road. The camera cuts to reveal the speaker sitting on a rail side bench next to chainlink fences, then cuts to an image of several polish laborers standing by the side of a repair car. The image strangely repeats and re-contextualizes the narrative he tells of the Nazi's brutality. There are strange contradictions in this re-telling between image and story. Instead of the workers working brutally, the "workers" are standing around, smoking cigarettes. If we view this holistically, the elements of the story can all be found in permutation-we can imagine through a montage that reveals its own construction.

Our imagination is inspired by processes of montage.