Rebecka Katz Thor

Beyond the Witness: Holocaust Representation and the Testimony of Images

In a time when all witnesses to the Holocaust soon have perished one possible route for commemoration is a return to images and ask what testimony they can give? This book seeks to answer the question of how images can bear witnesses, by examining them as multifaceted entities produced, reproduced and resituated in conflicting political and historical situations. Through a reading of three works that reinterpret archival material and positions it in a new time and context, I seek to explicate this relation and unfold the implications of that movement. In the three archive-based works, "Respite" by Harun Farocki 2007, "A Film Unfinished" by Yael Hersonski 2010, and "The Specialist: Portrait of a modern criminal" by Eyal Sivan 1999, the materials are reactivated and reinterpreted. The films are based on archival materials which is reworked visually and aurally. The footages discussed are understood as incomplete, like one individual testimony and dependent on context. Footage produced as internal Nazi propaganda and the video recording of a politically charged trial in the aftermath of the Holocaust, now mean something else. Photographic images, moving or still, are bound to their contexts and conditions of production and presentation. Hence, the testimony of images can be grasped through the archival conditions, context and framework (conditions for production) and means of representation (voice, narration and gaze). These means offer the framework for the analysis through which the testimony of images can be understood.

Rebecka Katz Thor
Art and Theory Publishing 2018