| Chapter 1: | Representing Atrocity |
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accounts, such as Robert Anthelme's L'Espèce humaine, embodied the portrayal of accurate, evocative accounts of the writer's experience of the Second World War. This vivid account was built upon personal reflection and surpasses the notion of testimony as historical drama through its deeply philosophical implications on the nature of humanity. Anthelme demonstrated the possibility (and indeed the necessity) for a space for the imaginative within conscious documentation. For many of those who witnessed the atrocities of war in such a direct and tangible way, the imaginative did not merely present itself as an artistic possibility, but rather as the only possible way to begin to express reality. As Anthelme states:
As with literature, cinematic discourse began to expose its identity as a creative means of simplifying expression. The human imagination constantly searches for methods of converting such a reality into universally available terms. How does one find within the deeply horrific, indescribable realities and mentally repugnant abominations of the Holocaust any immediacy of impression? Does not atrocity on such a scale and at such magnitude arrive at a certain threshold of experience where historical authenticity must transgress its own boundaries and collude with the imaginary? In such cases, it would seem that reality itself can only find self-representation by becoming an ‘unreal reality’. Artistic forms do have their own restrictions,