Bearing Witness in Analog and Digital Witness Films: Ethical Aesthetics in Shoah [1985] and Waltz with Bashir [2008]
Independent Researcher, 10247 Berlin, Germany
Genealogy 2022, 6(1), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010014
Received: 10 December 2021
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Revised: 8 February 2022
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Accepted: 10 February 2022
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Published: 11 February 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Painful Truths and Unspoken Words: Remembering Genocides and the Holocaust in Different Genres and Regions of the World)
In the ongoing and passionate debates over the digitalization of visual media, many questions about the ontology or materiality of the new digital image have been raised. Analog representation is often thought of in terms of indexicality and sometimes a naive belief in the truthfulness of the photographic image, whereas the digital image is, in a way, no longer an image anymore, but a set of data in flux, superficially coded and easy to manipulate. The following article examines how this shift to digitalization affects the ethical genre per se: the witness film. In a film analytical close reading of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, resonances become visible to psychoanalysis, Deleuzian film philosophy and the debates over the materiality of the analog and digital image. Lanzmann draws on a specific kind of indirect indexicality, which is highly interested in the psychic and embodied realities of surviving, witnessing and the passing of time, whereas Folman develops a politics of the powers of the false: truthfulness, accessibility and memorability are abolished in favor of false images, screen-memories and traumatic mis/representation, which are staged noticeably digital and altered, revolving around the impossibility to grasp the ungraspable.
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Keywords:
digitalization; documentary; fabulation; film; genocide; indexicality; media materiality; psychoanalysis; trauma; witness
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MDPI and ACS Style
Breitsohl, L.L. Bearing Witness in Analog and Digital Witness Films: Ethical Aesthetics in Shoah [1985] and Waltz with Bashir [2008]. Genealogy 2022, 6, 14. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010014
AMA Style
Breitsohl LL. Bearing Witness in Analog and Digital Witness Films: Ethical Aesthetics in Shoah [1985] and Waltz with Bashir [2008]. Genealogy. 2022; 6(1):14. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010014
Chicago/Turabian StyleBreitsohl, Louis L. 2022. "Bearing Witness in Analog and Digital Witness Films: Ethical Aesthetics in Shoah [1985] and Waltz with Bashir [2008]" Genealogy 6, no. 1: 14. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010014
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