Roma Sendyka

PHOTOHRAPHY, SHOCK AND WRATH: FRAMES OF WAR
Modern military conflicts seem to involve more and more ardently the tools of visual discourse. Machine-made pictures, as modern acheiropoeta, provide the mass spectatorship with countless images of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Balkans. However, the “war of images,” so often diagnosed by contemporary scholars of visual culture, seem to have an interesting feature, which so far has not been pronounced sufficiently enough in current discourse. Namely, the classical mode of pictorial representation of war concentrated predominantly on the Fronterlebnis: the First World War drawings or photographs showed soldiers in immediate combat; the contemporary mode of representation seems to prefer the pre- or post-combat situations: missiles before hitting the target, towns after the bombing etc. Therefore, the main position of the observer shifts from the one of the field soldier to the one of an observer, of a passive by-stander. Traditionally, this position was occupied by women and for that reason it is important to investigate their accounts of “looking at the war atrocities.” The article follows a discussion built up over the years by the books of Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas, 1936) and Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003), and a recent publication by Judith Butler (Frames of War, 2009).

The article discusses the testimonies of bystanders as presented to the public in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah. It proposes to apply norms and practices developed within Holocaust studies to the analysis of the victims’ testimonies in the emerging field of bystander studies. The Polish bystanders’ utterances in the documentary were edited and simplified through the process of interpretation and re-translation; this inaccurate rendition has been used in Holocaust debates and the lack of sensibility to this aspect of communication in Lanzmann’s film may result in skewed interpretation of the bystanders’ engagement in the scene of violence. The analysis proves that without renewed scrutiny to the bystanders’ speech Holocaust research may lose some important insights. Signs of violence impact, traces of traumatization or brutalization, specificity of cognitive and affective response may be overlooked. The paper calls for an universalizing epistemic approach to all types of the speech emerging from the Holocaust, beyond the (debatable) divisions of its social fabric into victims, perpetrators and bystanders.

Naturellement: Variant Translations Of The Accounts Given By Holocaust Bystanders In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah 

The article discusses testimonies of bystanders as presented in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah. It proposes to apply norms and practices developed in analysis of victims’testimonies within Holocaust studies to the newly-emerging field of bystander studies. The Polish bystanders’utterances in the documentary were edited and simplified through the process of interpretation and re-translation, and this inaccurate rendition has been used in debates about the Holocaust since then. Lack of sensibility to this aspect of communication in Lanzmann’s film may result in skewed interpretation of the bystanders’engagement in the scenes of violence. The analysis proves that without renewed examination of the bystanders’speech, Holocaust studies may lose some important insights. Signs of violence impact, traces of traumatization or brutalization, and the specific cognitive and affective response may be overlooked. The article calls for an universalizing epistemic approach to all types of speech emerging from the Holocaust, beyond the (debatable) divisions of its social fabric into victims, perpetrators and bystanders.

Recenzja:

Kulturowe studia miejskie. Wprowadzenie, E. Rewers (red.), Narodowe Centrum Kultury, Warszawa 2014.