| Chapter 1: | Representing Atrocity |
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It would seem that the artistic imagination and the creative spirit have been so frozen by the ungraspable and unfathomable realities of the Holocaust that no artist will ever fully be able to represent or bring clarity to the event in a satisfactory way, certainly not in a way that even begins to do justice to the depth and enormity of the horrors that its victims experienced. The journey from documentation to art, from the gross horrors of the Holocaust to their imaginative realisation in literature, is a devious and precarious one, laden with unforeseen detours and twists. The collusion of artistic imagination with modern history has only really allowed cinema to ‘skim’ the latter's surface. Those atrocities which marked the twentieth century have effected such a profound trauma and scar upon both the collective memory and artistic imagination that historical truth and cinematographic invention have indeed been forced to collaborate and, in a sense, ‘meet each other half way’. The larger filmic discourse pertaining to the Holocaust, particularly throughout the 1990s, provides historical insight and understanding rather than raw data. To anticipate that filmmakers act as historians is to base one's conception on a predated understanding of history as an accurate, objective recounting of the past and on the notion that the role of history belongs exclusively to the realm of the past in terms of its elucidation, explanation and interpretation of events, moments and people which no longer exist. One may argue, however, that the ‘experience’ of history through vision creates images that stay with the viewer long after the given plots and resolutions have disappeared. The simplistic nineteenth-century notion of history defined itself more through evidence and raw data than through the vision created by the artist who skilfully handles the latter. This notion stemmed from an ideological and cultural product of Western philosophy which gave precedence to the notion of scientific truth based on replicable experimentation. Of course,