| Chapter 1: | Representing Atrocity |
|
|
and indeed realism itself may be considered an art category. Within this light, it would be unwise to ignore the essentially fictive character of any artistic discourse. That is to say, full appreciation of any given art form demands, within the process, a recognition and embracing of its own limitations. It is interesting that Langer goes as far as drawing attention to the fact that even those images created in documentaries retain a certain quality of abstraction insofar as they do not in fact belong to a ‘shared reality’. For the director himself, those images do exist but only as a unique, singular moment. Nothing in reality can reinforce the memory of that moment—for the moment itself is without concrete source. A certain quality of abstraction will exist even in monochrome documentary. Whilst the latter has an irreplaceable and indisputable function within Holocaust film, the capacity for generic diversification within the representation of this horrific period of history has been evidenced through the rich variety of French films produced since the 1980s. Cinematic treatments of the Holocaust have been innovative, and this is partly due to the ‘post–New Wave’ interest in experimentation and in the striving of directors to locate the best genre/s to freely transcribe the philosophical aims of a particular film. These include films which are consciously naturalistic and which foreground irony and generic pastiche over classical realism and which may therefore be read as being postmodern. Despite the fact that recent studies on French cinema have expressed suspicion of such approaches (Susan Hayward argues that postmodern films inhibit the construction of meaning, and Jill Forbes refers to ‘worrying eclecticism’ and abandonment of ‘creative possibilities’ 6 ), a large quantity of academic study points to the ability of such films to problematise and subvert narrative convention. That is to say, such films demand an interrogation of the history of cinematic