| Chapter 1: | Representing Atrocity |
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Godard suggests here that the ‘banalisation’ of evil is in fact more horrifying and repugnant than its presence. What in fact constitutes ‘the really horrible thing’ that filmmakers of this period should strive to make object of the lens? In his account of life in the Lager, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi responds in part to this question in his work The Grey Zone. For him, the truly horrible thing is the very fact the majority of so-called ‘torturers’ (let alone administrative staff) had little choice other than to involve themselves (often reluctantly) due to their enslavement to the Nazi state. In this sense they too were often victims of the state, morally ‘grey’, neither good nor evil, but machine-like and indicative of the depth of the disease which had tainted the everyday lives of so many. The secretaries working for the Nazis were mainly political prisoners of Ukranian and Polish descent; others were German political prisoners. Levi refers to a hybrid class of prisoner-functionaries with ill-defined parameters which both served to join and separate the two camps of servitude and dictatorship. The Nazi system gave rise to an incredibly complex reality inside the camps where a ‘grey zone’ existed and where victims and persecutors could not be viewed in a black and white fashion. (Levi does clarify that the existence of this zone should not be confused with any notion of exchangeability between oppressor and oppressed outside of the camp including collaborators who were already adversaries.) In his work, Levi reveals the vile nature of a system that bred internal confusion due to the