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C 2002) Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 2002 (°
Film and Theater Review and Commentary
Holocaust Movies: Watching the Unwatchable David C. Lindy1
In the summer of 1939, my father-in-law, Noel Galen, was fourteen years old and spending his summer at camp in upstate New York. Noel and his fellow campers were acculturated, first generation, Jewish kids from New York City. Their parents, left-leaning and education-pushing, were unapologetic about their children’s ignorance of their Jewish heritage. Meanwhile, back in Europe, Hitler had other plans for their relatives. It is a story we all know, unspeakably painful to remember, dangerous to forget. Now, in the summer of 2001, I am at Noel’s farm on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, watching Holocaust movies with him and Sam, my fifteen year old son. I am working on a piece about movies of the Holocaust, and find I am baffled as to what to say about such a subject. What can psychoanalysis add to our understanding of something beyond our comprehension? With some vague notion that my sense of the Holocaust is connected to the idea of family, I suggest to Noel and Sam that we watch them together. It is in the nature of trauma that it is done to us. It makes us respond, even if only to stupefy. So there are two ways we can respond to trauma: passively, in the ways that it makes us be part of it, and actively, in the ways that we attempt to make it part of our selves. As analysts, we try to help traumatized patients heal, drawing on our empathy and our own traumas to connect with them. Artists heal, too, by creating artistic experiences that engage us empathically and give us a circumscribed opportunity to be there and survive. Analysts and artists both try to create a relationship to the traumatic material that will be powerful and empowering. One of the problems with the Holocaust is that it is too big. It defies representation. In Trauma: A Genealogy (The University of Chicago Press, 2000), Ruth Leys, Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins, examines the history of the concept of trauma, including its relationship to psychoanalysis. She describes 1 Correspondence
should be directed to David C. Lindy, M.D., 15 West 81st Street, New York,
NY 10024-6022. 127 C 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 1521-1401/02/0100-0127/0 °
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the Holocaust as the paradigmatic example of “the crisis of representation posed by trauma in our time” (p. 252). Dealing with the Holocaust means having to imagine the unimaginable. We can’t, and yet we must. Leys argues that trauma theory contains “a continuous tension” (p. 10) between views of internal and external reality as related to questions of the legitimacy of victimization vs. the possibility of personal responsibility. It is in the nature of trauma for these tensions to emerge and reemerge. Trauma theory is, therefore, forever necessarily driven back and forth between two irreconcilable poles which she calls the mimetic and antimimetic. Mimesis, from the Greek word for imitation, refers to a state of selflessness induced by overwhelming experience. The nature of this state is such that it leads to a profound identification with the experience or the object(s) associated with it, as in identification with the aggressor. Its prototype is the condition of the hypnotic subject under the suggestion of the hypnotist. Mimetic identification, thus, implies that trauma shatters the self to such a degree that the victim looks only to the victimizer for his/her sense of self. This becomes the only way that the trauma can be represented in the victim’s mind. In this state, Leys wonders if we can consider the victim to have even experienced the trauma. Can there be a possibility of memory or personal responsibility? Further, can there be a possibility of cure if the victim cannot remember the trauma because he/she was not there? Leys shows that, even as the mimetic leads logically to this position, it becomes absurd. The hypnotized subject is not really overwhelmed by the hypnotist, so much as just going along. We must be able to have agency, or at least be sufficiently intact in relation to a traumatic experience to make treatment possible. The antimimetic position leads to a view of trauma as a purely external event that we can stand apart from, but it also means that it has no effect on us. For Leys, trauma pulls us in two opposite directions: toward the mimetic, where we are totally overwhelmed and helplessly identified with the traumatic experience, or toward the antimimetic, where we are capable of perspective, but inhumanly detached. The question becomes: does an understanding of this mimetic/antimimetic tension enhance our understanding of how we experience Holocaust films? Does it help me understand what happens with my son and father-in-law? Does it give me perspective? One answer is that the artistic and analytic offer a working solution in the form of action, an approach that carefully negotiates its way through the minefield between Leys’ two poles. Here we try to create a path that gets us close enough to touch the trauma, while transforming it into something of beauty and hope. With this in mind, I would like to consider three films, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 “Schindler’s List,” Roberto Benigni’s 1999 “Life is Beautiful,” and
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Mirra Bank’s “Last Dance,” a work in progress. The first two are hugely well-known and deal directly with the Holocaust. Ms. Bank takes a very different approach, dealing not with the Holocaust per se, but with the issue just discussed, the process of creating a relationship to the trauma. First, we’ll look at Mr. Spielberg’s film. “Schindler’s List” has become the gold standard for recent Holocaust movies. Spielberg, master of immensely popular Hollywood movies that at their best capture a quintessentially American boyish thrill of being alive, stunned audiences with his depiction of the quintessential European nightmare. He tells the story of Oscar Schindler, the war profiteer, who uses his fortune to save the Jews who have provided the slave labor for his factories. Schindler was historically real, and the people he saved by putting their names on his list were real. Filmed in black and white, the movie is meant to feel like a documentary. It is as if Spielberg is saying that the camera, in providing an external record of events, provides a window on the truth. In Leys’ terms, this represents an antimimetic posture since we can only look at the outside of the experience. At the same time, we fall under the mimetic spell of the filmmaker’s view. Schindler himself casts quite a spell. He describes himself as being good at “the presentation,” and creates a working relationship to the war designed to profit the Nazis and himself. He attempts to handle the Holocaust via an antimimetic stance. He manipulates the reality, he hypnotizes everyone. Despite his genius for marketing, he shows himself to be true to his word, and remarkably unaffected by anti-Semitism. Like the resilient child in the traumatizing family, he possesses character traits that keep him open to the humanity of his slave laborers. As the war grinds on, his presentation is increasingly geared toward protecting his Jews, as he identifies and becomes one of them (mimetic identification). There are only three moments of color in the film. The first is the heartbreaking smear of purple on the coat of a little girl alone in the killing chaos as the SS eradicates the ghetto. We see her through Schindler’s eyes as he watches helplessly from a hilltop overlooking the ghetto. That speck of purple is our focus as the girl runs through streets filled with screaming, shooting Nazis and hysterical, dying Jews. She finally crawls under a bed in an abandoned room as the ghetto is emptied and night falls. She is about three and a half, my daughter’s age at the time I first saw the film. I could hardly watch it. This visual device binds us to this one child in this horrible moment of terror and helplessness. Later we see a pile of corpses, in their midst a purple coat, and we remember. What is overwhelming is not the pile of bodies, it is the one body. The other color is the yellow of Sabbath candles. The movie begins with a scene of Shabbos, a peasant family around the ornaments of the ritual.
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Candles are lit as prayers are chanted. The smoke peacefully ascends to the heavens, and we abruptly cut to the smoke from a Nazi locomotive, bringing Jews to the ghetto in Krakow. We are now in black and white. We see this yellow again as the war draws to its end, when Schindler, who now runs a “nonproductive” munitions factory, reminds the rabbi it is Friday sundown. The rabbi lights the candles for the first time in many years. They glow yellow. The ancient sound of Shabbos prayers falls on Nazi ears, and we hear it too. It is redemptive, a prayer for peace and community. It is also a prayer for the dead. A sobbing Schindler, leaving the camp to flee the oncoming Allies, says, “I could have done so much more!” Itzak Stern, the stoical Jew who manages Schindler’s businesses, hands Schindler a wedding band of gold made for him by his grateful protectees. It is engraved with an inscription from the Talmud that says, “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.” This is perhaps Spielberg’s point, that one person can save “the world entire” in the face of evil. Spielberg tells his Holocaust story with immense power. But the Holocaust is not simply the story of good versus evil. It is the story of an evil and hate and destruction that defies explanation. Our theories of neglect, abuse, and aggression—what do they explain here? Spielberg tries to tell an antimimetic story of personal responsibility and action, in part, perhaps, because of the antimimetic nature of film, but also, perhaps, because the mimetic nature of the Holocaust in its sheer enormity is not a story that can be told. To identify is to be hopelessly lost. Yet this is the tension that haunts the Schindler tale of personal redemption, between the hopelessness of complete identification and the power of empathic response. At the end of the film, there is a very moving ceremony in which the actors accompany the real survivors as, together, they place stones on Schindler’s grave in Israel. It is the movie’s final point of color. Schindler is one of us. Actor, survivor. The boundaries blur. We are all traumatized. We are all in this together. We are all laying stones on Schindler’s grave. In “Life Is Beautiful,” almost everything is in color. This, we are told by a disembodied voice in the beginning, is a “simple story, but not an easy one to tell.” It is “like a fable,” with “sorrow,” but “full of wonder and happiness.” It appears that this is going to be a story right out of a mimetic wonderland. How can there be any simple Holocaust stories? Webster’s Dictionary tells us that a fable is “a narration intended to enforce some truth or precept.” Simple and full of wonder as it may be, the truth that “life is beautiful” apparently needs to be “enforced.” It’s a tough sell. Nonetheless, in his delightful, Chaplinesque way, Benigni’s Guido Orefice does everything in his power to make a beautiful life in Mussolini’s Italy. He lives by the precept of the German philosopher Schopenhauer, “If you think it, it is.”
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Schopenhauer believed that the world as we experience it through our senses is mere representation, i.e., we do not experience the world as it really is, but only as we represent it to ourselves. Once in the camp, “if you think it, it is” becomes the metaphor for survival, not by ignoring reality, perhaps, but by making it into something else. Guido tells his son, Joshua, that the concentration camp is the site for a game to see who can win the most points by keeping quiet, hiding from the soldiers, and not crying from hunger. The winner gets a real tank, not just the kind of toy tank that Joshua loves. The game that they create becomes their reality, a triumph of the creative spirit. In Schopanhauer’s view, although we can never directly know the world, we can, through the exercise of will, know ourselves. Guido performs this act of will on behalf of his son, “enforcing” the truth that “life is beautiful” despite the grim reality of life in the camp. Leys might say that Guido has in effect hypnotized Joshua to allow the maintance of this charade. One dark, foggy night, however, Guido encounters a mountain of human bodies which emerges out of the fog. It is gray, colorless, the film’s only documentarylike moment. “We’re dreaming, Joshua,” Guido tells the boy asleep on his shoulder. At this moment, when the Holocaust threatens to overwhelm even Guido, he switches from “if you think it, it is” to denial: “it’s only a dream.” While “Schindler’s List” is fiction and “Life is Beautiful” is fable, Mirra Bank’s “Last Dance” is documentary. The film chronicles the creation of a theater-dance piece about the Holocaust. The piece is a sometimes painful collaboration between Maurice Sendak, the legendary author/illustrator known for his dark children’s tales, such as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, and the innovative dance company, Pilobolus. The company is known for its weirdly beautiful athleticism, where dancers throw themselves at each other across the stage and create living sculptures with their entwined bodies. Pilobolous is also noteworthy for its collaborative style of choreography in which pieces evolve in a dialectic between the dancers’ improvisation and the artistic directors’ collective vision. The collaboration with Sendak, however, involves finding a common ground between storyteller and dancer. In this way, “Last Dance” provides a rare glimpse into the workings of the creative process. As it unfolds, this process includes tension and conflict that are painful to watch even as they drive the process forward. Sendak is haunted by the Holocaust. He wants to tell a story “that draws blood,” a story dedicated to his ten cousins and many other relatives consumed by the Holocaust and to the “weird affrontery of my father catching a boat to America so I’m alive and they’re dead.” He wants to tell the story of “Brundibar,” an opera composed by the Jewish composer Hans Krasa and performed by the children of Teresienstadt, a fake Nazi camp intended to deceive Allied diplomats and Red Cross officials.
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Indeed, the Nazis went so far as to film a performance of “Brundibar” in Teresienstadt as proof of the rich cultural life and good conditions in the camp. Ms. Bank shows clips of the staged Nazi film of “happy Jews playing soccer,” as Sendak puts it, and of orchestras performing and happy children singing. Teresienstadt was in reality just a train ride from Auschwitz, where Krasa and almost every other Jew brought there perished. Sendak, under the pressure of the process, jokes that the dance should be called, “Nazis sending Jews to be cooked!” The Brundibar story is incredibly rich, with striking parallels, interestingly, to “Life is Beautiful.” It is a story of the redemptive power of art and imagination, in which the condemned create, perform, and appreciate an opera despite the reality of their fate. Even as it reflects their helplessness, their participation in this production allows them to forget and to hope. “Brundibar” represents a defeat of Nazi evil, even as they leave the performance to step on the trains to die. Indeed, Ela Weissberger, a Teresienstadt survivor interviewed in the film, testifies to the life-saving dimensions of this artistic experience for her. Like Guido and Joshua, she was able to “think it” and thereby, rise above it. This is not the story that Pilobolus is interested in, however. Jonathan Wolken, an artistic director and the only Jewish member of the dance company, is ferocious in his commitment to his vision of dance and the company’s process. He imagines audiences complaining, “Haven’t we heard enough about the Holocaust? Find a theater on the Upper West Side!” He believes in the collaboration as the means of creating a dance with the Holocaust as inspiration, not as the means to tell a Holocaust story. At several points, the conflict between Wolken and Sendak becomes so pointed that the process nearly breaks down. They fight about the degree to which the dance should be faithful to the memory of the Holocaust. It reaches a crescendo with the design of the end of the dance. A figure of death emerges who chooses who lives and who dies, an interesting twist on Schindler’s selection of the people on his list. The dancers chosen for extinction are naked, symbolically in relation to their fate, and literally on stage. Wolken argues that this is not motivated by the dance to this point, and is, therefore, gratuitous. Sendak is outraged, “It’s not gratuitous, it’s what happened!” Wolken replies, “It’s not about what happened, it’s about what works!” Sendak later says, “If they had pushed me too far with that one, I would have quit.” In the end, the creative process prevails, perhaps enlivened by the conflict, and the dance comes to life. Based on its closing scene, it is ultimately entitled, “A Selection.” The dance’s creation is beautifully captured by Ms. Bank. A theater director as well as filmmaker, she is in effect the third collaborator, “the third leg of the tripod,” as she says. Her film touches on parallels between the creative process and traumatic process, and she is
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concerned with memory and how it gets passed down. She is also, as an artist, concerned with keeping the story alive and new, something that will engage future generations with no direct relationship to these events. While it is clear that she is deeply involved with the dance, she feels a need to tell a story of the Holocaust. She provides archival footage of Nazi round-ups, door latches driven home on railroad cars bound for the ovens, a starving child dancing, a sister trying desperately to rouse a dying sibling, the suffering of children. This is also the story Sendak wants to tell. Ms. Bank lets it come through powerfully, even as she allows the story of the dance to unfold. I recently had the pleasure of seeing “A Selection” performed, and while I enjoyed it, I was left feeling that it needed to be closer to its inspiration, closer to the Holocaust. Back on the Eastern Shore, Noel, Sam, and I each struggled with these films in our own way. We span three generations. Like Sendak, Noel lived through those days. Indeed, a fellow camper and friend from that summer of 1939, ended up a prisoner of war in a German camp for Jewish soldiers. He came out of the war weighing 89 lbs. For Noel, these films are like home movies. For Sam, an adolescent of the twenty-first century and sophisticated movie viewer, these films fill him with an unbearable sense of injustice and saddness that make them almost unwatchable for him. As his father, part of the generation of postwar kids who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, I share Spielberg and Bank’s desire to pass these memories on, while knowing that means traumatizing my child. Like Guido, I want to protect him from the impossible reality of these memories, to transform them into something beautiful. They are not beautiful. Yet, it is through this act of transformation, performed by artist, analyst, or father, that we create redemption out of the unimaginable trauma of the Holocaust.
