Notes Introduction: Is the Past a Foreign Country? 1 In this respect Matuszewski’s writings foreshadow the work of another Polish film theorist, Karol Irzykowski, an author of X Muza (The Tenth Muse), pub- lished for the first time in 1924 (on Irzykowski’s views on film’s mimetic capability see Mazierska 1989). 2 However, Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma are practically ignored by professional historians. Even Robert Rosenstone, widely regarded as the main authority in the area of history and film, in a recent essay, ‘Space for the Bird to Fly’, published in the collection Manifestos for History (Rosenstone 2007), quotes Godard’s now rather clichéd remark about a beginning, a middle and an end of a story, but does not mention his monumental historical work. None of the essays in this collection, Manifestos for History, including Mark Poster’s ‘Manifesto for a History of the Media’ (Poster 2007), refers to Godard’s work, despite the fact that it fulfils all the main conditions of a ‘manifesto for his- tory’ (Jenkins et al. 2007). 1 The Burden of the Past and the Lightness of the Present: Dealing with Historic Trauma through Film 1 I refer here to the ‘Holocaust’ not in its original meaning, as ‘ritual purifica- tion’, but as a metaphor of the Nazi genocide. Despite the problems inscribed in this term, I find it less ambiguous and controversial than terms such as ‘Auschwitz’. Some scholars, however, object to using it (for example Lang 1990: xx–xxi). 2 The literature about the problems of representation of the Holocaust is huge and still growing. Nevertheless, the collection Probing the Limits of Representation, edited by Saul Friedlander, includes the most important, in my view, arguments about representability or unrepresentability of the Holocaust (Friedlander 1992; see also LaCapra 1994; Loshitzky 1997; Levi and Rothberg 2003; Rancière 2007: 109–38). 3 Žižek’s assertion is supported by the special position of a poem ‘Campo di Fiori’ (1943) by Czesław Miłosz, about the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, in the Polish memory of the Holocaust. 4 In Praise of Love and Ararat had a cinema audience in Europe of about 150,000 viewers; Weiser, which was shown only in Polish cinemas, 30,000. These and other box-office results quoted in this book are based on the Lumiere database (http://lumiere.obs.coe.int/web/search/), unless a different source is mentioned. 5 This also explains Godard’s fascination with the Polish film about the concen- tration camps, Pasaz˙erka (The Passenger, 1963) by Andrzej Munk. 247 248 Notes to Chapter 2 6 On numerous occasions Godard criticised Schindler’s List and even regarded it as his personal failure that he failed ‘to prevent M. Spielberg from rebuild- ing Auschwitz’ (quoted in Brody 2008: 562). However, Spielberg’s contribu- tion to ‘Holocaust studies’ also includes the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which comprises over 1000 hours of archival footage. 7 Edgar’s impotence to change his ideas into a tangible product inevitably is reminiscent of Le mépris (1963) and Passion, where Europeans also proved unable to make films or at least had to rely on American funding to com- plete them. 8 The belated suicides bring to mind the suicides of some famous Jewish and non-Jewish survivors of the war and concentration camps, such as Tadeusz Borowski in 1951, in Poland, Paul Celan in 1970 and Romain Gary in 1980, in France, and Primo Levi in 1987, in Italy. 9 One can guess that for Said the attitude of the Canadian state towards ethnic identities is a form of Orientalism: a way of containing the ‘other’, prevent- ing the emigrants from full assimilation with the West and retaining their original identities. Such criticism is valid, but in my view the practice also has the advantage of allowing the West to learn from the East, which often happens in Egoyan’s films. 10 Marczewski does not refer to Gross’s works, perhaps he did not even read them. Yet, the similarity between these two works supports Halbwachs’s claim that all memory is collective; people belonging to the same culture remember similar things and in a similar way. A factor in the similarity of Gross’s and Marczewski’s take on Polish anti-Semitism is their belonging to the same generation: Marczewski was born in 1944, Gross in 1947. For both of them the year 1968 was thus a formative experience. 11 The attitudes of Poles and artists to the Jews perishing in ghettos are dis- cussed by Jan Błon´ski in his essay ‘Biedni Polacy patrza˛ na getto’ (Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto). This essay, published for the first time in the influential Polish Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny in 1987, played an important role in changing Polish attitudes to the Polish Jewish past (Błon´ski 1987). 12 Juliana is played by Juliane Köhler, who in due course would play Eva Braun in Downfall, where she encapsulates a woman who as close to ‘history’ as anybody can be, but at the same time unable or unwilling to face it, therefore prefers to ‘seize the day’. Her role in Marczewski’s film prefigures this type. 2 ‘Our Hitler’: New Representations of Hitler in European Films 1 The makers of films about Hitler are in this respect in a similar position to artists creating anti-fascist monuments (on anti-fascist countermonuments see Young 2003). 2 This blocking of the memory about involvement in Nazi atrocities and giv- ing into Hitler’s charm was facilitated by the Allied-supported policy of the integration of former Nazis into the new West German society and, in a wider sense, by the realities of the cold war (Herf 1997, 2002; Judt 1992). It was also in a measure a legacy of the First World War (Geyer 1997). Notes to Chapter 2 249 3 Yet, European cinema is not free of these ‘sins’. Practically all European cinemas have indigenous traditions of melodrama, and commercial pressures also exist in them. 4 The perceptions of Nazism as ultra-modern and anti-modern can be recon- ciled. The first perception pertains to a victim and observer of Nazism, as priv- ileged in Bauman’s book, which focuses on the industrial and bureaucratic character of Nazi killings. For Hitler’s followers, by contrast, sheltered (at least initially) from Nazi barbarities, what mattered was the promise of returning to an old German bucolic ideal. It can be argued that Hitler attempted to return to a premodern past by accelerating modernity. Not surprisingly, his project failed. 5 Sokurov’s depiction of the Berghof remains in contrast with the image of the Berghof we receive from documentary footage and photographs, some made by Eva Braun, of a spacious mansion set in a sunny, idyllic landscape. However, it partly conforms to the depiction offered by Traudl Junge in her memoirs, who emphasises the fog enwrapping the mountains, the difficulty of leaving the house due to its physical location and being confined by her benevolent master (Junge 2004: 56–103). 6 The motif of mother and son also reflects the director’s specific taste for the mother–son relationship, as conveyed by his earlier film, Mat i syn (Mother and Son, 1997). 7 As Joachim Fest observes, Hitler himself declared that ‘with the exception of Richard Wagner he had “no forerunners”, and by Wagner he meant not only the composer, but Wagner the personality, “the greatest prophetic figure the German people had had”’ (Fest 1974: 49). Fest lists many parallels between Hitler and the composer, from their obsessions about the destiny of the German people, affinity for theatricality and pomp, through morbid hatred of Jews, vegetarianism, ‘which Wagner ultimately developed into the ludicrous delusion that humanity must be saved by a vegetarian diet’ (ibid.), an idea to which Hitler also alludes in one of his deranged monologues, included in Sokurov’s film. 8 This attitude, most likely, was true about Hitler – whilst in his public pro- nouncements he expressed contempt for Stalin and his people, in reality he regarded Stalin as an equal, even surpassing him in some respects. Similarly, he was forced to accept that Russian soldiers proved superior to German sol- diers (Junge 2004: 145–8). 9 As commander of Bavarian Group Command IV, Mayr became one of the ‘midwives of Hitler’s political career’ (Kershaw 1998: 122). He sent Hitler on a course in ‘civic thinking’ (Fest 1974: 113). This course was a reward for Hitler’s achievements as an informant for the commission which was set up to look into the events during the Soviet rule in Bavaria. In due course, Mayr, urged by his superior to write a paper on the subject of ‘the danger Jewry constitutes to our people today’, asked Hitler to do it, ‘addressing him as “My Dear Herr Hitler”, an unusual salutation from a captain to a corporal’ (ibid.: 115). The response Hitler gave was very similar to that we hear in the film. On both occasions Hitler condemned an emotional anti-Semitism, which finds its expression in pogroms, opting for ‘anti-Semitism of reason’, which leads to the planned judicial opposition to and elimination of the privileges of Jews and, ultimately, to the removal of the Jews altogether (ibid.). 250 Notes to Chapter 2 10 Hitler, in reality, being 175 cm tall, was of over-average height. In many photographs we see him as taller than the bulk of men who surround him. However, in most films he is represented as of below-average height, reflect- ing a desire to undermine him.