FILM AND TRAUMA

Shoah – film testimony of a trauma

There is almost no discussion on the Holocaust in art which misses to include Shoah, a film directed by French director Claude Lanzmann. The film unifies a large number of persons, different in terms of their origin and function, in their inability to testify. According to Jacques Lacan, the characters are determined in relation to a signifier that circles, but is not seen. Since the seeing community was not realized, Shoshana Felman dubs the Holocaust an event without witnesses – not in an empirical sense, but cognitively and perceptively. Faced with the non-language of trauma, the survivals are caught in a paradoxical trap which at the same time unites the obligation to keep the secret (and silence provides a safety haven) but also the necessity to testify, or rather express condolences. The ghost, as Jacgues Derrida perceives it, keeps coming back and showing through in the distance. Does Freudian supervised recollection lead to art? Gertrud Koch finds the comeback of absence in an aesthetic form. The unconscious is thus staged – materializing subjectivity, Shoah produces its own fictitious reality.

Marija Sruk