Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 34

undermined the evidentiary qualities of the testimonies. These testimonies
are not watched and listened to because of the aesthetic quality of the
film that presents them or because of the ingenuity—including occasional
ruthlessness—of the film’s director or because of the way the film thinks. �� It
is ultimately the testimonies that matter, not their transformation into film,
although the director’s cinematographic approach, problematic as it may
be, may help spectators to think about what they saw and listened to. It may
help spectators to believe the witnesses despite the seeming incredibility—in
the sense of beyond belief—of the testimonies. �� This is what survivors need,
too. Wieviorka (����:xiv) concludes that discourses and practices revolving
around the Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust have “become, for
better or for worse, the definitive model for memory construction.” The use
of audiovisuality helped establish these discourses and practices as models
(and this assessment does by no means call into question the power of such
testimonies as Primo Levi’s books that do not rely on audiovisual culture). ��
Rothberg has demonstrated that the era of the witness would hardly have
come into existence in the way it did without the preceding and parallel era
of decolonization and the discourses both revolving around it and making
it possible. Rothberg emphasizes cross-fertilization, interrelationships, and
interactions among different discourses. Rothberg (����:���) stresses “the
need for a comparative approach to the multidirectionality of collective
memory that considers questions of politics, aesthetics, and the public
sphere in a nonreductive, transnational framework.” In light of Rothberg’s
argumentation, it makes sense to analytically decouple concepts that have
been developed in connection with the Holocaust from the Holocaust
(without denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust or relativizing it)
and to think about the question of what these writings—altered, further
developed, specified in light of specific cases—tell us about other cases
and other memory constructions as well (just as it makes sense to proceed
the other way round and ask what other memory discourses reveal about
the construction of Holocaust memory). Margalit’s (����) concept of the
moral witness, referenced in international studies in Danchev’s work on the
artist as moralist (����:�), is a case in point. What can we learn about the
memories of the independence wars in Africa by thinking about them in
��
Shapiro (����) explores how films think.
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Korhonen (����:���) argues that testimony “relies on an act of faith: we must choose whether we
believe the witness or nor.”
��
Rothberg (����:���–���) connects audio-visual technologies with the emergence of the survivor as
a public figure in his discussion of both the Eichmann trial and its televisual broadcast and Jean
Rouch and Edgar Morin’s film Chronique d’un été (����–����), i.e., years before the Lanzmann film.
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