The Innocent Gaze: Filming the Aftermath of the Holocaust in Post-War Poland

• In Event: Memory and Denial

Abstract

Scholar Antoine de Baecque writes about a “cinema after extermination, after the camp footage” to describe how filmmakers were affected by the images shot in the camps by the liberating soldiers. Their gaze no longer innocent, filmmakers were forced to rediscover reality introducing new ways of filming it. The birth of modern cinema is thus traced back to the encounter between cinema and the Holocaust.

The process of rediscovering reality marks also the work of a group of Polish-Jewish filmmakers who, after the conflict, returned to Poland and started recording the new reality born out of the horrors of the war. The filmmakers of the cooperative Kinor (among them the director Nathan Gross and the producers Shaul and Isaac Goskind) documented the miracle of the Jewish community’s rebirth in Poland by filming its events, institutions, and activities. But contrary to the filmmakers confronting the aftermath of the Holocaust in the camps, the gaze of the Jewish filmmakers upon Poland’s post-war reality was characterized by an innocence that marveled at the survivors’ embrace of life. The images produced by Kinor evoke an immediate encounter between the cinema and the world: reality naturally guides the gaze and thus the camera movements.

Discussing the concept of “gaze qua object,” Slavoj Žižek suggests that through the innocent gaze, the viewer sees “in the object (in the image it views) its own gaze…sees itself seeing.” The filmmakers of Kinor were survivors: their engagement with the profilmic was highly personal and the innocence of their gaze was derived by the fact that the act of filmmaking in itself was an aspect of the rebirth of the Jewish community which in turn was the subject of their work: when pointing the camera to the world the filmmakers were filming themselves.

By filming the post-Holocaust life in Poland, the Jewish filmmakers created a way of bringing the Holocaust on the screen that did not require a reformulation of the cinematic praxis, only opening the eyes to the world.

Author

• Rocco Giansante, Yad Vashem