History and images: Yael Hersonski’s "A Film Unfinished"

Abstract

The complex relations of the cinematic image with history and memory are the context for the analysis of A Film Unfinished. The author refers to other documentary evidence of the Holocaust Night and Fog by Alain Resnais and Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, to the concept of postmemory Marianne Hirsch and image epistemology Georges Didi-Huberman. This film presents the found footage — a Nazi propaganda document Das Ghetto subjected to the strategy of representation, which consists of a complex network of viewpoints, including various formal procedures. The au­thor reflects on the status of images combined with the testimony of the survivors, the diaries of the ghetto inhabitants, the statements of the Nazi cameraman.