Saturday, June 11, 2011

A Film Unfinished



From the description:
The Holocaust confronted humanity not only with inconceivable horrors, but also for the first time, with their systematic documentation. More than anything else, it is the photographic documentation of these horrors that has changed forever the way in which the past is archived. Atrocities committed by the Nazis were photographed more extensively than any evils, before or after. Yet since the war, these images, created by the perpetrators have been subjected to mistreatments: in the best of cases they were crudely used as illustrations of the many stories; in the worst, they were presented as straightforward historical truth.
At one point in the documentary, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto watches a staged scene from the propaganda film in which a woman in an elegant apartment moves a vase of flowers from a table to a sideboard. "What on earth?" she asks. "Where did one ever see a flower? We would have eaten the flower."

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