Harun Farocki reflects on the filmstrip-as-archive in a handful of films and writings from the 1990s.[1] In films such as Der Ausdruck der Hände (The Expression of Hands, 1997) and Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995), Farocki’s film-archives are, in his own words, a form of classification, a “future library for moving images, in which one can search for and retrieve elements of pictures.”[2] Farocki’s filmstrip-as-archive is also questioning: it interrogates the way that images have been used in film history, as well as what the image contains (the expression of hands, workers leaving the factory and so on), and how the said images are constructed, and the processes by which they have been appropriated. In this process of reflection on the image from the archive, Farocki’s film as archive also becomes a meditation on the historical and cultural value of the images in question, as well as of images more generally.

Farocki’s writing on the filmstrip-as-archive lays the foundations for further consideration of the dilemmas faced by images in recycled film narratives. In addition, his films might be thought of as living examples of the filmstrip-as-archive, a place and space where still and moving images are deposited, preserved, reordered, revitalized, reconceived for a contemporary audience. Specifically, Farocki’s notion is useful in order to examine the recycling of lost or forgotten photographs from the Nazi period: the fact that a filmic re-presentation of photographs from the Nazi period is an opportunity to interrogate their use and value in the archive as well as to recast them for present day purposes of remembering this past. If the ideological, cultural and historical power of images concerns the way they are used and reused, then the filmstrip-as-archive is itself an example of reuse simultaneously preoccupied with the power and value of the image in its original.

Perhaps most significantly, film as an archive for photography is built on an inherent tension that begins with the historically and aesthetically vexed relations between static and moving images, with implications of stasis, death, and the freezing of time. Especially as it was conceived of and used in the Nazi Holocaust, the still photograph has the potential to rupture the motion and fluidity of any filmstrip. And yet, as Karen Beckman and Jean Ma remind us in a recent collection of essays, cinema is born of the static photographic image: the still photographic image is both the basic component of the moving cinematic image and its historical beginning, a birth marked by the film projector cranking into motion the Lumière’s still photograph in 1895.[3]

In this article, I build on the “generative and irresolvable encounter between stasis and motion,”[4] the tension between still and moving images, and consider how, due to the very presence of this tension, a filmstrip has the potential to perpetuate the event which is frozen in time by a photograph. This perpetuation, or creation of a new time and space for the forgotten image and the trauma of the Holocaust it witnesses is enabled through the filmic process of re-animation. In one sense, this revitalization is enabled by the movement of the film image such that it affects an archive in motion. When the once forgotten still photograph is archived, placed in motion in a cinematic image, it takes on a form that, in turn means we cannot forget it. At least, this is a claim that can be made of The Portraitist/Portrecista (Ireneusz Dobrowolski, 2005, TVP1, 55 mins.), a documentary film that can be understood as an archive for the still photographs taken at Auschwitz that it re-presents. Furthermore, such a film is a mnemonic archive that offers its audience the opportunity to engage in the process of remembering the history of the Holocaust at Auschwitz.

The overwhelming archival practices pursued by the Nazis took the form of an obsession to catalogue, to systematize human labour, human identity, the human being. Before it was archived, the photograph for the Nazi’s was “proof” of what was before the camera, the photograph as a material trace of reality. An appreciation of the filmstrip-as-archive encourages a host of alternative conceptions both of the photograph and of archival practices. The filmstrip-as-archive has the potential, but not necessarily the imperative, to counter the life of photographic images during the Nazi regime, first and foremost because of its motion. The film image, as it is used in The Portraitist, challenges the photograph as stasis, death, and destruction. When approached as archive, strips of moving images that recycle static images from the Nazi period create a sense of possibility and openness through the gaps created inviting viewers to engage with the proliferation of discourses of witnessing, memory and history.

The Film as Archive

The film appropriates and re-traces history, forgotten and unknown photographs as fragmentary material otherwise obscure and retrieves this material in “a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory.”[5] The film creates its own archive out of existing archival documents and is engaged in a new kind of ordering, thereby “underscor[ing] the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private. Further, [it] often [arranges] these materials according to a quasi-archival logic, a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and [presents it] in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects.”[6] The development of these fragmentary narratives as archives in which to store obscure images opens up a space for the images to create memories, conserve the past, and also indicate that these images are of interest today and in the future since it is dealing with forms of memory.[7] The narrative of The Portraitist uses archival images to remind us that World War II and the way it is remembered is still open for debate, as yet, an unfinished history. And, in keeping with many of the discourses on the found footage film, a film such as The Portaitist is committed to countering the meaning of the images in their Nazi-era context.[8]

The retrieval of forgotten or unknown photographs from obscurity is not enough, per se, to legitimize a film as an archive for photography. Indeed, many films retrieve images from obscurity through their use of old footage or photographs. Certain of Hal Foster’s descriptions of the archive adequately describe the common goal of the recycled narrative. He says they “seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.”[9] That is, they are historical evidence. I am interested in The Portraitist as an archive for photography because it does more than simply “make historical information … present”. The film is also eager to identify and explore the material found in the archive, an archive whose structure and intention it challenges through use of specifically cinematic strategies, as a narrative of appropriation that foregrounds the images, allowing them to breathe and speak for themselves, while simultaneously interrogating them, and interpreting their context from the perspective of the present. Another kind of historical documentary film might use the archive, construct a narrative of appropriation that is not so concerned with the origins of the images, but see them as unfulfilled projects, obscure historical traces that need interpretation in order to make sense.[10] Often this interpretation is overwhelmed by the prejudices of the present moment, towards history and, in particular, exposing the manipulations of Nazi doctrine and ideology, its claim to be coherent, hermetic and all-consuming.

While in both cases, there is an acknowledgement that the images contribute to history, it becomes a question of where the emphasis lies: are the images used to distance the past from the present, thus to alleviate all responsibility for the past? Or are they redeployed in the interests of igniting a dialogue between past and present? Is the filmstrip-as-archive institutive (or creative), destructive, or a mixture of the two, in its relationship to history?

In The Portraitist, we find the creative interpretation of the archive and the creation of a new archive in an historical documentary whereby a dialogue between past and present becomes the actual subject of representation and as a consequence uncovers the complexities of the historical moment of production. This self-awareness immediately opens up to a discussion with the viewer and with other texts.

The Portraitist does not radically reconstruct or reorganize the archival images. In fact, as I go on to point out, the film uses conventional historical documentary techniques in its re-presentation and reconsideration of material from the past. Nevertheless, it is in the cinematic re-presentation of the archival material that the discourses of possibility are ignited. The potency of The Portraitist is in the cinematic re-presentation, or the cinematic archiving, of still images that were once in an archive that worked to fix, categorize and delimit the photographic image. Thus, the possibility of challenging, even offending, the categorical power of the Nazi image archive as object that owns the principal insight into truth comes through otherwise conventional historical documentary techniques.

Another way of conceptualizing the strategies used in The Portraitist is to think of the recycled film as an “enunciation” of all the possibilities of re-presentation. Such a formulation follows the thinking of Giorgio Agamben in his work on the agency of the witness to speak in the face of the unspeakable Auschwitz in Remnants of Auschwitz.[11] This approach introduces the discourse on death that is appropriate given the subject matter of the photographs and films in The Portraitist. There is always an element of death and revivification in the process of archival archaeology. The very existence of a document or image in an archive casts it as dead, as a ruin, buried to the past, and yet, it also speaks the image as ripe for future memories.[12] To archive is to preserve that which has now already past, is dead, and awaits “resurrection under the historian’s gaze.”[13] If we transfer this archival announcement of the death of the subject to archival photographic images of World War II, we bring the perspective in line with Farocki’s observations that the photograph marks the subject out for death, much as those who were photographed on their arrival at Auschwitz were marked out for death by the camera that documented them.[14] And, in turn, the cinema brings revivification.

Wilhelm Brasse, the photographer in The Portraitist, agrees that his archive, and the film-as-archives evidence, preserve and revivify photographic portraits of the dead as they are taken on entry at Auschwitz. He announces that as long as the subject is depicted in a photograph on her arrival at Auschwitz, she is already dead. He tells of a woman who had worked as telephonist for the Germans, seen too many deaths, and asked to have her photograph taken before committing suicide. A portrait is not even a premonition, but again and again in this film, the portrait is a warrant to murder, or a wish to die, a part of the ritual of death. A number is designated, a uniform is handed out, the head is shaved, the subject posed, the portrait taken, filed away in an archive, and thus, marked for extermination. Much like the prisoner is documented and classified, de-anthropomorphized and imprisoned by the Nazis, the image is numbered, systematized and, as a fragment or trace of the present, relegated to extinction in its file in an archive. These images have been lost to the archive, much like the prisoners at Auschwitz are lost to history. The question is will the image, like the prisoner, be left to disintegrate, to follow a path towards death and enforced destruction? Or will it be resurrected, revitalized, flagged up for its incompleteness in new discourses of witnessing and memory, thereby signalling its relevance and that of the past it imagines to the present?

Nevertheless, when the otherwise dead image is cast into a discourse of witnessing, as is the case in The Portraitist, the discourse necessarily takes place outside of the photographic image, in another place, at another time. The image that survives triggers a memory that is held and perpetuated by the contemporary viewer, at an historical and a geographical remove from Auschwitz that echoes the survival of the prisoner marked for destruction through the existence of her photograph. Survival is passed on from photograph to the memory of the one who sees her image. And when the image is brought back to life by its placement in the filmstrip, survival is guaranteed. To reinforce, however, these images can only become involved in the process of witnessing if they are first placed in and thus rescued by an archive, in this case Brasse’s archive and later the film as archive.

Lastly, of critical importance to the productivity of this particular notion of the filmstrip-as-archive is its inherent incompleteness. In his discussion of the British artist, Tacita Dean’s use of found objects, found sound, found words and found images, Foster emphasizes the recovery of archival objects and moments “as a concomitant of her archival presentation of the past as fundamentally heterogeneous and always incomplete.”[15] This incompleteness is precisely what enables the possible development of memory narratives. To reiterate, when the fragmentation of the archival image is kept alive through an open and incomplete film narrative, the viewer is invited to embrace the dynamic and shifting nature of the past. This openness is an invitation “to probe a misplaced past, to collage its different signs … to ascertain what might remain for the present.” Thus, to reinforce, the filmstrip-as-archive is not a form of systematization. It is anomic and fragmented in an attempt to represent and to “work through, and [propose] new orders of affective association, however partial and provisional.”[16] In this way, it resists the building of a monument or a shrine to the dead. Foster ends his discussion of the archive by asking “Why else connect so feverishly if things did not appear so frightfully disconnected in the first place?”[17] To translate this to The Portraitist as archive, if World War II history, and in particular, Germany’s role in it as is witnessed by the photographic images represented in films such as The Portraitist, were coherent, totalized, finished, done and dusted, why would there be a need to reiterate that same history over and over again? As Foster also notes, in line with other discourses on the archive, the amnesia of contemporary culture is such that if the archive is forever locked away, out of reach of those whose history is hidden in it, inaccessible to those who must take part in that history to prevent its recurrence, then, as a phenomenon, it functions as a form of forgetting.[18] And thus, the ignorance of the integrity of the archival images, in the absence of openness and incompletion is the danger that, in this case the filmstrip-as-archive, will forget what it claims to remember: the textured and varied nature of a past that must be kept alive today.[19]

The Portraitist

“The portraitist” in the title of Dobrowolski’s film is Brasse, a Polish political prisoner at Auschwitz who worked for the Erkennungsdienst – the identification service that documented camp activities. On his own entry to Auschwitz, Brasse was appointed by the German Authorities to take photographs, a “privilege” afforded him because of his knowledge of German and his experience as a photographer. His job was to document new arrivals, medical and scientific experiments, portraits for the Germans’ camp ID passes, and at times, to photograph a German officer’s portrait which would be made into postcards for him to send home. Even before we looked into the eyes of the new arrival in the photograph, we are reminded that the very production of the image embraces the Nazi obsession with documents, records, classification as well as their resounding belief in the photograph as an authentic and accurate mode of documentation, a mimetic equation with the thing itself. Brasse explains: the prisoner was given a number, was precisely posed, lights fixed in a standard set up, the camera distance fixed by a special device. There was no room for the unanticipated in this official use of the photograph as document. Brasse’s images are akin to the lists of names, figures, physical descriptions, times and places that we know to have been recorded by the SS and the Gestapo. Brasse may have been employed as “the portraitist,” but his only task was to press the button on the camera. He had no say in the composition, camera distance, lighting, or pose of the sitter. Even the facial expression and prison garb of the subject was dictated in advance by the system that authored the photographs.[20] Again, the unexpected, the aberration, the unwanted are strategically guarded against. Brasse explains the routine thus:

Before being photographed, a prisoner was to be neatly shaved … there were three types of photos taken. The first was in a hat. The second one with no hat on. “Mütze ab! Und gerade ausschauen.” Next, the prisoner was moved with the chair to the side, and the third photo was the prisoner’s profile. Then the command “wek” meaning “go out”… the prisoner went out, the chair was put in front again, and the next prisoner was approaching, given a number. That’s how it proceeded, everything went quickly and smoothly.

Interwoven with the re-presentation of the identity photographs Brasse took of the prisoners, The Portraitist is also a portrait of Brasse. In keeping with this genre of historical documentary, Brasse is typically shot against a black background, sitting as if for a portrait photograph, in varied camera lengths, from extreme close-ups to full shot. His image as it relates his experience in the concentration camp is edited together with archival footage of daily life in the Poland of his childhood. Similarly, in his voiceover he tells of his experience as a photographer in his aunt’s studio prior to the war. We learn that it was this experience before the war that “qualified him” for the job of photographer for the Nazis, together with the fact that his Austrian grandfather had spoken German with his father. When Brasse mentions the appearance of Hitler in his daily life, when the girls in his home town of Zwyiec wear lockets on their chains and inside is a picture of Hitler, the film takes us to Germany, and edits together archival footage that represents the freneticism of German life at this time: we see well-known images of rallies, shop fronts with “Juden Raus” painted on the windows, and then train loads of prisoners arriving at Auschwitz. In this sense, Brasse’s portrait is the history of the Holocaust, and a concise history of the events that led up to the arrival of Europe’s Jewish population on the platform at Auschwitz.

There is another portrait of Brasse that is shown simultaneously, a visual portrait comprised of mirror-like montages of multiple reflections of Brasse in the lens of the old slide projector through which we see the portraits he took at Auschwitz. The distortion and fragmentation of his face on this lens in close up is another familiar strategy of the historical documentary. We duly understand that Brasse is the author of this narrative, the architect of an archive as it is re-presented as evidence to be challenged, before being re-archived in The Portraitist. Through this visual fragmentation, Dobrowolski presents Brasse as equally fractured as the history told by the photographs he made in collaboration with the Nazis. His version, his memory archive is, we understand, an incomplete perspective of history. Brasse was, after all, like Primo Levi, one of those prisoners caught in the impossible bind of doing a job that ensured the smooth running of the machinery of death. Brasse’s life was spared: thanks to the fact that he took photographs, he had a place in the system, thus, was not carted off to the crematorium. Ironically, his life was dependent on the documentation of his fellows on their way to death. The Portraitist fragments and fractures Brasse’s image in what amounts to an expression of a continuity between his memories and those generated by the portraits he takes, portraits that are only ever a skewed representation of those depicted. This does not mean that the film dismisses or devalues Brasse’s memories, but that they are marked out for what they are: fragmentary, a perspective, an image.

By extension, the film’s manipulation of the photographs through other typical strategies of the historical documentary, make no secret of the fact that the photographs as historical material are a representation, not a reliable replication of the sitter. Thus, for example, The Portraitist cuts from a bifurcated image of Brasse in the lens of the projector to a snapshot black and white photograph of an older woman in a format that will become revealed as standardized. Her face appears in the three separate photographs on a strip of portraits: on the right hand side, she wears a hat and looks slightly to the left, on the left hand side, a profile shot looking right, and in the middle image her face appears in a full-frontal, direct-to-camera address. The strip of photographs appears just as Brasse had promised they would through his description of the set up. All three images are standard head and shoulder shots, police mug shots.

Brasse refers to himself as a “police photographer,” saying that during his time at Auschwitz he “had taken circa forty to fifty thousand police photos”. And like police photographs, “the distance from the photographed man was also fixed … the camera had this special device to fix the distance. The prisoner could not smile, or make a sorrowful face.” To be sure, Brasse’s photographs bear many similarities to those in archives from the late 19th century described by Allan Sekula. The photograph to be archived at Auschwitz is a standardized record that identifies, classifies, oppresses and manipulates. “The lights were fixed, the camera was also immovable.” According to Sekula, 19th century authorities such as police and other state institutions photographed and created archives of criminals, vagrants, and all manner of social “undesirables”. For the Nazis, however, it was the Jews who needed to be contained, curtailed, the power of their difference had to be negated through photographic documentation and filing away for safety. Sekula’s is now a standard conception of the modernist archive. In an archetypal modernist frame, the Nazis understood the photograph as part of the process of controlling and dehumanizing, objectifying their enemy. Brasse also remembers that the faces were not to be bloodied or beaten or bruised, they had to be clean, the photograph thereby “factual,” the faces non-emotional, without trace of opinion, desire, a past, a future, in short, without identity. Following Sekula’s logic regarding the 19th century institutional control of the photograph, to display traces of human identity such as emotion, desire and facial expression would risk betrayal of Nazi vulnerability, and ultimate inability, to contain their subjects. As long as the prisoners have a human identity, they maintain the possibility of non-conformity, and thus, expose the potential weakness in the Nazi mode of regimentation, the flaws, thus the senselessness of their system. As Sekula points out, this is what binds the criminal to the photograph: both carry within them the threat to create disorder, the human prisoner through his resistance to objectification, the photograph through its promise to proliferate out of control. For this reason, the threats posed by both prisoner and photograph must be hidden from view, reduced to quantifiable objects and placed in an archive.

The Portraitist uses its camera, the voiceover, and the inclusion of familiar techniques of the historical documentary, to negate the photographic and archival policies practiced at Auschwitz, it explodes the notion of the static photograph as proof. The camera moves closer and closer to a photograph of a young woman, the film cuts back to Brasse telling her story, or is it that of her fellow prisoners? He tells of an incident he saw when women were slapped and beaten by an SS Woman, and when The Portraitist cuts back to the girl in the photograph as it rests in Brasse’s hand, the camera zooms in, the light of The Portraitist clearly defined around her head, and all we can see is the bruise on her face, the cut on her lip. We see very clearly, we imagine this young woman being slapped, brutally mistreated by the SS officer in Brasse’s story. Meanwhile, the soundtrack of The Portraitist plays a melancholy tune, and we cannot help but be drawn to the girl’s eyes, and the cut on her lip seems to get worse. She becomes humanized, we are moved by what seems to be her beckoning to be seen, her pain and the suffering we imagine she felt, even if her look is distant and constant. The film’s spotlight on the photograph, the constantly shifting focal length, the soundtrack, Brasse’s voice narration, all of these together challenge the fixity of the photograph in the Nazi archive. Indeed, these strategies bring the photograph alive, challenge the photograph as objective document, as the woman becomes more than the object the Nazis wanted her to be. The film’s techniques reveal the potential of the image to erupt, to come alive, as it indeed does again and again in memory as we watch Dobrowolski’s film.

This example also demonstrates how The Portraitist narrates Brasse’s stories so that they move between the private and the public, the individual woman in the photograph and all women prisoners at Auschwitz. Using these familiar visual strategies, the film makes the invisible visible, and Brasse’s voice gives identity to those who suffered, those in the photograph, as well as, those who are absent from the photograph. Each photograph is an iconic reference of all those who were brutally murdered by this system. Brasse never speaks on behalf of the photographed, but rather, their voices as individuals are raised in our minds as we watch and listen to the film. And because the woman remains anonymous, is not given an identity, and her only history is between arrival and death at Auschwitz, her image becomes suggestive of a much broader phenomenon of cruelty and violence: we are encouraged to call to mind all the others who were murdered like her at Auschwitz. In another example, Brasse relates how one day he recognized a man from his town in Poland when he appeared before his camera, and Brasse was shocked to see someone he recognized. At another point in the film, he tells us how he was ordered to take a photograph of a physician from Budapest, but it transpired that the woman had already been gassed, she died before she could have her photograph taken, before she could be marked as dead. The voiceover narration overlays photographs, headshots, one after the other, a train of faces that may or may not correspond to the individuals in Brasse’s memory. However, this slippage from individual to community, from specific to general is what makes the film so powerful: we hear of the fate of individuals and watch as they are reduced to an anonymous statistic.

Having explained the processes of photographic production, Brasse continues to tell stories, the narratives behind and before the photographs that are triggered in his memory. His stories expose the cameras (both photographic and film), for what they cannot tell, what they choose not to tell. They are stories of the most horrific victimization suffered by those in the images. As Brasse remembers, so the film’s image oscillates between close ups of his aged, yet animated face, and the fast-paced collage of what seems like hundreds of photographic portraits, each image only slightly distinguishable from the next. Each head is shaved, the eyes sunken, the face sallow, the look empty, opaque. And each image is framed identically, lit, constructed, just as Brasse says it is in his voiceover. The faces and the photographs are on this level, reduced to objects with negligible value.

Thus, The Portraitist excavates an archive, the photographic archive ordered by the Nazis at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, only to discredit the memory of the same archive. Nevertheless, discreditation does not mean erasure of the archival photographs, but rather, as with to the image of the young woman who is being beaten, it revivifies them. It does not matter whether the woman in the image corresponds to the one in Brasse’s memory. What matters is the woman being beaten in our memory. The film has still other strategies for reanimating the events of the past in the mind of the viewer. It is not only Brasse’s telling of stories on the soundtrack that achieves this end but, in another typical strategy of the historical documentary, the still archival images are put in motion by The Portraitist. For example, the film re-presents archival photographs of the arrivals at Auschwitz, the train loads of prisoners, not knowing where they are, or that they are entering a world of torture and death. Their belongings are piled up, ransacked, further telling the tale of loss, destruction, and death. And we begin to see the foreground and background of the image separated as though a moving camera passes over two different photographs going in opposite directions – a screen split between foreground and background. At these moments, the still images are animated by the appearance of the movement of the cinema. The death that pervades the medium and subject matter of the photographs is poignantly remembered by the viewer as these scenes are brought to life. Trains in a station – one of the most potent signifiers of the Nazi horror and destruction – are set into motion, given even greater potency through cinematic techniques. Thus, the photograph is literally reanimated, the stasis and stricture of the photographic image challenged by the ontology of film and the dehumanization, objectification and murder that plague this historical chapter, caught as it is in a photograph but remembered in a cinematic present.

If we understand this manipulation of the still photograph as a challenge to the fixity of the Nazi archive, the filmic re-appropriation not only retrieves the archival image and represents it for a contemporary audience, but it creates a new kind of archive. This new archive, the film-as-archive moves from evidence and document, via individual story, to create public history. It is an archive that transforms a fixed moment in the past, to a re-conception of the past in the present, thereby creating a discursive space in motion that invites us to engage in a process of witnessing this past. The film offers us these images to integrate into our present-day witnessing of the atrocities of Auschwitz, from a previously unexplored perspective. And it does this by using familiar strategies of self-conscious presentation, interweaving archival images with a present day portrait of Brasse, static photographs and the moving image.

Like the creative, melancholy archives described by Foster, The Portraitist retrieves and brings into public circulation the photographs that were otherwise lost to memory and history. And it goes further: in the process of developing a fragmentary narrative-as-archive, a place to store obscure images and to conserve the past, the film initiates a process in which it opens up a space for the images to create memories, images of interest today that bring the past into existence.

Like so many sensitive documents that harbor the potential to expose vulnerability in Nazi ranks, when the time came to evacuate Auschwitz, the order was given to burn the archives of photographs for fear that they would be evidence of the activities in the camp, and thus betray them to the Allies as enemy. However, this was an order Brasse disobeyed in his act of resistance to the Nazis. In a gesture of retribution, seizing the Nazis’ nervousness around the photograph, their moment of uncertainty, their fear of its “spinning out of control” due to its status as evidence of not only their presence, but as identification of their vigorous insistence on its standardization and regulation, The Portraitist exposes what they perhaps feared the most: being caught at their crimes. Dobrowolski does this through plucking the image from an archive as ripe for the creation of future memories.[21] And before him, Brasse had also done the same when he extinguished the fire and rescued what became his archive from incineration on evacuation. As indicated above, the photograph is the life of the photographer, once the Nazis who authored it, and the archive is the property of the one who collects it. And in Brasse’s determination to rescue the photographs, the archive became his. As Brasse himself explains, the photographs were the “proof of a horrible past and the terrible genocide that took place in the camps.” If the memory of these atrocities is to be kept alive, the photographs must be placed in an open, endlessly mutating archive.

Brasse was not a Jew. He was a Pole who had been offered “freedom” (his word) by joining the German army on entry to Auschwitz. He refused and was given a number along with all the other prisoners. His luck in surviving is not lost on Brasse. As mentioned above, the usefulness of the prisoner to the Nazis ensured his life, and in Brasse’s case his survival was directly linked to his life before the war, his ability to take photographs. Thus, while for the prisoners a photograph meant certain death, for Brasse the need for and existence of photographs were equated with the continuation of life. Brasse says he intended to be a photographer after the war, but every time he tried, he was unable to forget an image of four young, skeletal girls who had been used in an experiment conducted by Dr Mengele. When Brasse looks through a camera lens today, he sees the image of the four starved bodies and remembers their eventual gassing in the crematorium. As Brasse reflects on this image and his trauma, the camera of The Portraitist moves over and around the image of the girls. We too are invited to see the four young girls that it might become the way we remember, the way we archive and recall the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazis’ scientific experiments. Thus, Brasse is no longer able to take photographs. One could also argue, according to the logic of the motivation and life of the photograph in Auschwitz, Brasse no longer needs to take photographs in his civilian, postwar life, no longer needs to document death in order to stay alive. He is, in the order of things, given the privilege of recalling his story, and its history thanks to his archive. Brasse is not the one whose image was once stripped of its humanity through being placed in an archive. And because the Nazis authored the photographic portrait of the newly arrived at Auschwitz, neither is Brasse indicted with the survival of the images, he has the privilege of archiving them. Thus we recognize the power and agency of the archivist. Even if that agency is to do nothing other than to stay alive and to tell one’s story, it is considerable. This formulation of Brasse’s role in the power and ideological relationships of the archive should not lead to an indictment of him as the portraitist. The film does not condemn him, but rather draws on his archive as an opportunity to re-archive the Nazi image, a chance to transfer power from the perpetrator to the prisoner. In turn, Brasse’s archive is re-archived to show that the very same archival object creates different memories as they are animated in the film as a vehicle that moves between event and image, past and present, the personal and the political. In turn, The Portraitist as archive takes its viewer on its journey, and invites memories of still different perspectives of the represented history.

Envoi

To understand the full ramifications of the conceptualization of The Portraitist as archive it is useful to juxtapose it with the work of Christian Boltanski, and also, of the Tower of Faces in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington. Next to Boltanski’s installations we see how The Portraitist traffics between a focus on the individual and a representation of all those destroyed at Auschwitz. For Boltanski, the archive of photographs that he appropriates and the one he recreates is a way of addressing what it means to archive, the necessity to remember, and the processes of memorial. Thus, in works such as The Dead Swiss series begun in 1990, Boltanski uses photographs taken from the obituaries of a Swiss newspaper, blows them up, thus distorts the image and renders the already anonymous individual unrecognizeable,[22] As a result, our attention is not focussed on the dead individual, but on the call to engage in processes of public memory for crimes committed, the memory of the brutality of death in general. The presentation of Boltanski’s work further erases the individual when he places a spotlight, complete with electrical leads directly on the face in the image. This strategy simultaneously suggests and criticises the shrine or devotional monument to the dead. The ambivalence solicited by the installation thus ensures a critical, reflective visitor, a visitor who is challenged to reflect on his or her own processes of memory and memorialization

This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme.

Endnotes

[1] Harun Farocki, Bilderschatz, 3rd International Flusser Lecture (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2001).
[2] Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” in Harun Farocki, Nachdruck Imprint/Text Writings (New York: Lukas & Sternberg and Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2001) 231.
[3] Beckman, Karen and Jean Ma, eds. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 6.
[4] Beckman and Ma, 9.
[5] Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22.
[6] Foster, 5.
[7] This notion of the archive as a formation to house the repetition, reproduction of memories comes from Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). I want to use Derrida’s notion of the archive as this repository and simultaneous landscape of possibility, but don’t want to engage in the psychoanalytical discourse at the base of it.
[8] See William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993). Stella Bruzzi also gives a useful overview of the use of found footage in the representation of historical events. See Stella Bruzzi, “The Event: Archive and Newsreel,” in New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000). 1-40.
[9] Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 4.
[10] Foster, 5. The most obvious example in this vein is the made-for-television historical documentary that claims to be evidence of traumatic events, but is in fact, an opportunity to retell a familiar history of World War II and the Holocaust. For more on this, see Frances Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
[11] Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
[12] See Renée Green, “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae, 2002” in Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 49-50.
[13] Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 143.
[14] See Harun Farocki, Bilder der Welt, Inschrift des Krieges/Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1989. He takes this idea from Walter Benjamin, and for a fuller discussion of this process, see my article, “Dislocations: Videograms of a Revolution and the Search for Images,” in Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch, eds., Companion to German Cinema (New York: Blackwell Publishers, forthcoming).
[15] Foster, An Archival Impulse. The analogy to the collation practices of contemporary artists such as Dean and Gerhard Richter in Atlas might appear unconvincing. However, as Patrick Sjöberg leans on Buchloh to demonstrate very convincingly that the accumulation practices of these artists follows similar principles and provides a convenient heuristic for understanding the “compilation” film. He says they can all be read as “symptoms of several interconnected discourses of accumulation and organizing principles; cultures of display; historigraphic cue-markers, and aesthetic objects or statements.” See Patrick Sjöberg, The World in Pieces: A Study of Compilation Film (Stockholm: Aura förlag, 2001), 69.
[16] Foster, 21.
[17] Foster, 22
[18] Foster, fn. 60
[19] This also accords with Foucault’s notion of the archive in Archaeology of Knowledge and “Fantasia on the Library” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. He is interested in the archival relation as it is instantiated between painting and museum, a single painting and the vast canvas of painting. “Each new archive both liberates and constrains, and each new transformation is both a transgressing and a trumping (“recuperation” is not dialectical enough to describe this event.” See, Hal Foster, ”The Archive without Museums,” October 77 (Summer 1996): 13.
[20] This is a literal example of the way Nazi ideology takes extreme measures to ensure authorship of images produced in its name.
[21] See Reneé Green, “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae, 2002.”
[22] Boltanski chooses Swiss subjects because according to him, they “have no reason – or at least historical reason – to die”.

Created on: Sunday, 7 November 2010