Visceral versus Cerebral Reactions

While I understood Georges Didi-Huberman’s points in Images in Spite of All about how montage can enhance the meaning of photographs and history, and why he thinks Shoah and Histoire(s) du Cinema are effective films. However, for me, the cerebral understanding of the Holocaust presented by Shoah just doesn’t produce the same effect as Night and Fog. In Shoah, Lanzmann “thinks that no image is capable of ‘saying’ that history,” (126) as he feels that the Holocaust requires a reassessment of the power of images. This ties into Huberman’s argument about how the “unimaginable” Holocaust must be made imaginable, and the ways by which this could happen. But while it may be true that no images would be sufficient to capture fully the horror and destruction of the Holocaust, I think that Night and Fog conveyed that to me personally much more than the other two films because of its use of imagery.

I watched all three films, and the only one that I had to turn away from at the end because I was feeling physically sick was Night and Fog. I think that Huberman almost focuses too much on the movies that try to avoid direct imagery than the ones that use it well- he ignores the visceral effect of actually seeing things. I think that by leaving out that bodily, strong emotional reaction that you get from seeing violent, cruel, acts, the other films were actually less successful in depicting the Holocaust. It is that desire or compulsion to turn away that defined the Holocaust and the way people think about it now (it was ignored by everyone because no one wanted to believe it, and now people don’t want to discuss it for the feelings it brings up), so to ignore that important reaction is to leave out an integral part of the memory and meaning of the Holocaust, and history in general. Shoah’s various testimonies and narratives were interesting, but mainly in an academic way; in a way, they assisted the obliteration efforts put forth by the Nazis. I think the image has more credit than Huberman gives it in this case (he says it has power, but in the case of the Holocaust I think it has more than usual).

And on that note, I found his discussion of obliteration and memory in relation to history and photography interesting and wished he elaborated on it more. For a book with a title that contains “Four Photographs from Auschwitz,” he spends remarkably little time talking about the photos themselves. He speaks of what they say about the conditions under which they were took, which was compelling, and I would like to hear more about his views on other photographs of concentration camps. I think more discussion of the power of photographs and how they figure into memory would have been effective.