The challenge of film considered as historical research: Claude Lanzmann's approach to the Shoah - constructing history in dialectical time-images

In: Cultural Studies Review, Band 14, Heft 1, S. 124-136

Abstract

Considering film as historical research entails thinking of it not just as a historical source or
a kind of popularised presentation of history, but as a tool of production by which unique
historical insights can be gained. In this essay I wish to take up Robert Rosenstone's suggestion that we might consider some filmmakers as historians and push it a little further by exploring Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah as a model for the filmic inquiry into history. To treat Lanzmann's film as a model and not just an example refers to Theodor W. Adornos notion of a model as something that "covers the specific, and more than the specific, without letting it evaporate in its more general super-concept." I analyze how the film deals with the specific problems of representation of the Shoah and extract different modes of inscriptions of history into the film and different modes of construction of historical relations to the past events. To further theorize these modes of inscription and construction I employ Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image and Gilles Deleuze's concept of the time-image by merging the two concepts from two different philosophical schools. The analysis shows that Lanzmann's filmic answer to the problem of representation established a model that sheds light on what a post-Auschwitz historical relation to the past could be, and what significant part films could play in this regard. Perhaps this historic relation established in film is the emergence of what Adorno had called for: a new kind of truth that is not bound to the corrupted concept of adequatio.