Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Public Memory
Author(s): Miriam Bratu Hansen
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Winter, 1996), pp. 292-312
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343973
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Critical Inquiry
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blockbuster of 1915, The Birth of a Nation.1 If we bracket obvious differences between the films (which are perhaps not quite as obvious as they
may seem) and bracket eight decades of media history, we are tempted
to make the comparison because a similar seismic intensity characterizes
both Spielberg's ambition and the film's public reception Each film demonstratively takes on a trauma of collective historical dimensions; and
each reworks this trauma in the name of memory and national identity,
inscribed with particular notions of race, sexuality, and family. Each film
participates in the contested discourse of fiftieth-year commemorations,
marking the eventual surrender of survivor- (or veteran-) based memory
to the vicissitudes of public history. While The Birth of a Nation was not the
For astute readings and suggestions on this essay, I wish to thank Homi Bhabha, Bill
Brown, Michael Geyer, Alison Landsberg, and audiences at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the annual conference of the Society for Cinema Studies, March 1994.
1. The comparison was first suggested, in a somewhat different spirit, in Terrence Rafferty, "A Man of Transactions," review of Schindler's List, New Yorker, 20 Dec. 1993, p. 132.
Rafferty praises the epic significance and "visionary clarity" of Schindler's List by invoking
James Agee's reverie about The Birth of a Nation as "'a perfect realization of a collective
dream of what the Civil War was like, as veterans might remember it fifty years later, or as
children, fifty years later, might imagine it"' (p. 132). Obviously, such a comparison asks to
be turned against itself; see Philip Gourevitch, "A Dissent on Schindler's List," Commentary 97
(Feb. 1994): 52.
Critical Inquiry 22 (Winter 1996)
292
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Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (1972; Minneapolis, 1993); see also my foreword to this
edition, pp. ix-xli.
3. Woodrow Wilson, quoted in Michael Rogin, "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision':
D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation," in "The Birth of a Nation": D. W Griffith, Director, ed.
Robert Lang (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994), p. 251, an excellent essay on the film's intervention in the contemporary political and ideological context. See also Janet Staiger, "The Birth
of a Nation: Reconsidering Its Reception," in "The Birth of a Nation," pp. 195-213. For an
earlier account, see Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942
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caust, but also the more general issue of the relationship of intellectuals
to mass culture, specifically to the media publics of cinema and television.
I see both these issues encapsulated in the pervasive polarization of critical argument into the opposition between Schindler's List and Claude
Lanzmann's documentary Shoah (1985) as two mutually exclusive paradigms of cinematically representing or not-representing the Holocaust.
This opposition, I will argue, does not yield a productive way of dealing
with either the films or the larger issues involved.4
adulatory coverage in the trades, the daily press, and TV talk shows.
The second, though by no means secondary, level of reception is the
mercurial factor of popular reception. While this reception is no doubt
produced and shaped by official publicity, it cannot be totally reduced to
intended response. The distinct dynamics of popular reception comes to
(New York, 1977), chap. 2. On the film's devastating and lasting effects on African Americans' cinematic representation and relation to film practice, see Black American Cinema, ed.
Manthia Diawara (New York, 1993).
4. For a comment on the relationship between the two films, see Yosefa Loshitzky, "Holocaust Others: Spielberg's Schindler's List versus Lanzmann's Shoah," in Spielberg's Holocaust:
Critical Perspectives on "Schindler's List," ed. Loshitzky (Bloomington, Ind., 1996).
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Critical Inquiry
8. See Michael Geyer, "On the Uses of Shame: The German Politics of Memory," in
Radical Evil, ed. Joan Copjec (London, 1995). See also Geyer and Hansen, "German-Jewish
Memory and National Consciousness," in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed.
Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford, 1994), pp. 175-90.
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heimer and Adorno's sense); (b) the problem of narrative; (c) the question
of cinematic subjectivity; and (d) the question of representation.
a) The first and obvious argument is that Schindler's List is and remains a Hollywood product. As such it is circumscribed by the economic
and ideological tenets of the culture industry, with its unquestioned and
supreme values of entertainment and spectacle; its fetishism of style and
glamour; its penchant for superlatives and historicist grasp at any and all
experience (the "ultimate statement on" or "the greatest Holocaust film
ever made"); and its reifying, levelling, and trivializing effect on everything it touches. In this argument, Schindler's List is usually aligned with
Spielberg's previous megaspectacles, especiallyJurassic Park, and accused
of having turned the Holocaust into a theme park. Since the business of
Hollywood is entertainment, preferably in the key of sentimental optimism, there is something intrinsically and profoundly incommensurable
about the "re-creation" of the traumatic events of the Shoah "for the sake
9. See Hartman, "Public Memory and Its Discontents," Raritan 13 (Spring 1994): 2440. Hartman defines "contemporary public memory" in contradistinction to "traditional col-
lective memory" (p. 33). I am using the term in a more general and less pessimistic sense
indebted to Negt and Kluge's theory of the public sphere (see n. 2). See also Hartman,
"The Cinema Animal: On Spielberg's Schindler's List," Salmagundi, nos. 106-7 (Spring/Summer 1995): 127-45.
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Critical Inquiry
b) The second and more local argument made about the film's inadequacy to the topic it engages is that it does so in the form of a fictional
narrative. One emphasis in this argument is on the choice of fiction (notwithstanding the film's pretensions to historical "authenticity") over nonfiction or documentary, a form of film practice that would have allowed
for a different organization of space and temporality, different sound/
image relations, and therefore different possibilities of approaching the
events portrayed. Attendant upon the film's fictional form-with its
(nineteenth-century) novelistic and historicist underpinnings-is the
claim, supported by the publicity and Spielberg's complicity with it, that
Schindler's List does not just represent one story from the Shoah but that
it does so in a representative manner-that it encapsulates the totality of
the Holocaust experience.'3 If that were the case, the film's focus on the
heroic exception, the Gentile rescuer and the miracle of survival, would
indeed distort the proportions and thus end up falsifying the record.
Related to this charge is the condemnation of the film's choice of a
10. Art Spiegelman, in J. Hoberman et al., "Schindler's List: Myth, Movie, and Memory,"
Village Voice, 29 Mar. 1994, p. 27; hereafter abbreviated "MMM." See also Sean Mitchell's
profile of Spiegelman, "Now, for a Little Hedonism," Los Angeles Times, 18 Dec. 1994, pp. 7,
97-98, esp. p. 98.
11. Hoberman, "Spielberg's Oskar," Village Voice, 21 Dec. 1993, p. 63. See also Rich,
"Extras in the Shadows," New York Times, 2 Jan. 1994, p. 4, and Leon Wieseltier, "Close
Encounters of the Nazi Kind," The New Republic, 24 Jan. 1994, p. 42.
12. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas
Weyr (New York, 1984), p. 13. Friedlander himself discusses this question in an essay scheduled to appear in Spielberg's Holocaust. See also Friedlander's introduction to the volume
of essays, edited by him, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution"
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 1-21.
13. See Ora Gelley, "Narration and the Embodiment of Power in Schindler's List," paper
delivered at the Society for Cinema Studies annual conference, New York, March 1995.
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Critical Inquiry
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"Gentile Persuasion," Chicago Reader, 17 Dec. 1993, pp. 10, 26-27, and Gelley, "Narration
and the Embodiment of Power in Schindler's List."
22. Ilene Rosenzweig, quoted in Rich, "Extras in the Shadows," p. 4. See Donald Kuspit, "Director's Guilt," Artforum 32 (Feb. 1994): 11-12. See also "MMM," p. 26.
23. See, for instance, Christian Metz, "Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film"
(pp. 35-65) and "The Imaginary Signifier" (pp. 244-78); Raymond Bellour, "Segmenting/
Analyzing" (pp. 66-92) and "The Obvious and the Code" (pp. 93-101); Kaja Silverman,
"Suture" (pp. 219-35); Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space" (pp. 379-420); and Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (pp. 198-209), in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology.
For a critique of the cine-semiotic concept of "enunciation," see Bordwell, Narration and the
Fiction Film, pp. 21-26.
24. See Koch, "The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes
on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," trans. Daniel and Hansen, October, no. 48 (Spring 1989):
15-24. See also Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums
(Frankfurt am Main, 1992), esp. pt. 2, "Film und Faktizitat: Zur filmischen Reprasentation
derJudenvernichtung," pp. 127-84.
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Critical Inquiry
the past (the fallacy of historical films from The Birth of a Nation
by posing as the "real thing" the film usurps the place of the ac
What is worse, it does so with an event that defies depiction, w
ror renders any attempt at direct representation obscene. Spielberg
transgresses the boundaries of representability most notoriously, critics
agree, when he takes the camera across the threshold of what we, and
the women in the film "mistakenly" deported to Auschwitz, believe to be
a gas chamber. Thus Schindler's List, like the TV miniseries Holocaust, ends
up both trivializing and sensationalizing the Shoah.
Lanzmann, the most radical proponent of this critique, accuses
Schindler's List of not respecting the unique and absolute status of the Holocaust: "unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderline
that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of horror that cannot be transmitted. To claim it is possible to do so is to be
guilty of the most serious transgression."25 The counterexample of a film
that respects that boundary and succeeds in an aesthetic figuration of the
very impossibility of representation is, for both Lanzmann and other critics of Spielberg, his own film Shoah (1985). Lanzmann's film strictly refuses any direct representation of the past, whether by means of fictional
reenactment or archival footage. Instead, the film combines interviews
featuring various types of witnesses (survivors, perpetrators, bystanders,
historians) to give testimony at once to the physical, sense-defying details
of mass extermination and to the "historical crisis of witnessing" presented
by the Shoah.26 This crisis threatens not merely the project of a retrospective, anamnestic account but the very possibility and concept of eyewitnessing and, by extension, the recording capacity of the photographic
media. (This is why Lanzmann so radically distrusts Spielberg's untroubled accessing-or, as Lanzmann calls it, "fabrication"-of a visual archive: "If I had stumbled on a real SS film-a secret film, because filming
was strictly forbidden-that showed how 3,000 Jewish men, women and
children were gassed in Auschwitz's crematorium 2, not only would I not
have shown it but I would have destroyed it.")27
Lanzmann's argument, like the critique of Schindler's List in the name
of Shoah, is bound up with a complex philosophical debate surrounding
the Holocaust, which I cannot do justice to here. Suffice it to say that the
moral argument about the impossibility of representation-of mimetic
doubling-is linked, via a quasi-theological invocation of the Second
Commandment, to the issue of the singularity of the Shoah, its status as
25. Lanzmann, "Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth," p. 14. Lanzmann makes the
same argument in his critique of the TV miniseries Holocaust, "From the Holocaust to the
Holocaust," trans. Simon Srebrny, Telos 42 (Winter 1979-80): 137-43.
26. Shoshana Felman, "The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," in Felman
and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New
York, 1992), p. 206.
27. Lanzmann, "Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth," p. 14.
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Critical Inquiry
commented on the film's use of sound (except for complaints about the
sentimental and melodramatic music)-not to mention how few have actually granted the film a closer look. Although I share some of the reservations paraphrased above, I still would argue that Schindler's List is a
more sophisticated, elliptical, and self-conscious film than its critics acknowledge (and the self-consciousness is not limited to the epilogue in
which we see the actors together with the survivors they play file past
Schindler's Jerusalem grave). Let me cite a few, brief examples that suggest that we might imagine this film differently, examples pertaining to
both the film's complex use of sound and its structuring of narration and
cinematic subjectivity.
To begin with the latter point, the complaint that the film is narrated
from the point of view of the perpetrators ignores the crucial function of
Stern in the enunciative structure of the film. Throughout the film, Stern
This moment not only marks, on the diegetic level of the film, Schindler's
first conscious engagement in bartering for Jewish lives; it also inscribes
the absolute difference in power between Gentiles and Jews on the level
31. See James E Lastra, Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation,
Modernity (forthcoming). See also Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York,
1992).
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more like the "glue" that traditionally covers over any discontinuity and
sutures the viewer into the film.)32 But the persistent splitting of the im-
age track by means of displaced diegetic sound still undercuts the effect
of an immediate and totalitarian grasp on reality-such as is produced
by perfect sound/image matching in numerous World War II films or, to
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tion of the present, however, Schindler's List makes use of these dev
material and textual specificity is itself a symptom of the impasse produced by the intellectual critique, an impasse that I find epitomized in
the binary opposition of Schindler's List and Shoah. (Lanzmann's position
in this regard is only the most extreme version of this opposition: "In
[Spielberg's] film there is no reflection, no thought, about what is the
Holocaust and no thought about what is cinema. Because if he would
have thought, he would not have made it-or he would have made
Shoah. ")34 It is one thing to use Shoah for the purpose of spelling out the
philosophical and ethical issues of cinematic representation in relation to
the Shoah; it is another to accuse Schindler's List of not being the same
kind of film. For while Shoah has indeed changed the parameters of Holocaust representation, it is not without problems, aesthetic as well as political, nor is it sacrosanct.
represented and produced in late capitalism. This is not to say that Shoah
did not have to compete for funding in an unequal struggle with commercial cinema; nor that it did not have to fight for distribution and access. But once the film was released, especially in the United States, it
entered the commercial circuit of the art film market and was praised by
the same critics and in the same hyperbolic terms that celebrated Schindler's List.
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Critical Inquiry
and sifted through piles of photographs. See Hellmuth Karasek, "Die ganze Wahrheit
schwarz auf weiB: Regisseur Steven Spielberg uber seinen Film Schindlers Liste," Der Spiegel,
2 Feb. 1994, p. 185. In the same interview, however, he acknowledges having thought of
"Rosebud" to capture the enigmatic distance, the lack of clear, intelligible motivation, with
which he conceived of the Schindler character. See also Annette Insdorf, in "MMM," p. 28.
Whether or not inspired by Welles, the relative restraint and withholding of interiority in
Spielberg's construction of the Schindler character, at least during the film's first half, is in
my opinion much preferable to the omniscient, unrestricted access we get to Schindler's
feelings and thoughts in Thomas Keneally's novel on which the film is based.
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And Schindler replies: "I'd make sure it's known the company's
ness. I'd see that it had a certain panache. That's what I'm good
the work, not the work: the presentation!") But out of that cip
con man/grifter/gambler develops an "authentic" person, an in
and intelligible character, a morally responsible agent. No doub
berg himself has an investment in this redemptive trajectory; a
number of critics have pointed out, the director strongly ident
his protagonist, he does so in defense of a capitalist culture, of
ics that fuses modernist style, popular storytelling, and an etho
vidual responsibility. Whether he succeeds in reversing Citize
pessimistic trajectory, that is, in disentangling Schindler-and t
of the Schindler Jews-from the reifying effects of mass-media
tacular consumer culture, is an open question, depending as much on
the film's long-term public effects as on textual critique.
But perhaps this question is beside the point, as is treating the opposition of Shoah versus Schindler's List as if it were a practical alternative, a
ows and children, not even burial sites that would have provided a link
with a more "organic" tradition of oral and collective memory.)38 In a
significant way, even before the passing of the last survivors, the remem-
brance of the Shoah, to the extent that it was public and collective, has
always been more dependent on mass-mediated forms of memory-on
what Alison Landsberg calls "prosthetic memory."39
Much has been written about the changing fabric of memory in postmodern media society, in particular the emergence of new cultural practices (new types of exhibits, the museum boom) that allow the beholders
to experience the past-any past, not necessarily their own-with greater
intensity and sensuous immediacy (compare the Washington Holocaust
museum).40 We need to understand the place of Schindler's List in the con38. See the papers presented at "Per una memoria Europea dei crimi Nazisti," an international conference to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1944 massacres around
Arezzo, 22-24 June 1994.
39. See Alison Landsberg, "Prosthetic Memory: The Logics and Politics of Memory in
Modern American Culture" (Ph.D. diss. in progress, University of Chicago), esp. chap. 4.
40. See Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York,
1995), esp. chaps. 1 and 12. See also Landsberg, "The 'Waning of Our Historicity'? A Closer
Look at the Media of Experience" (paper delivered at the Society for Cinema Studies annual conference, New York, Mar. 1995). For a brief survey of issues involved in American
memorial culture, see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradi-
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