F I L M I N G H I STO RY F R O M B E LOW

N ON F I C T I ON S
 Nonfictions is dedicated to expanding and deepening the range of contemporary
documentary studies. It aims to engage in the theoretical conversation about
documentaries, open new areas of scholarship, and recover lost or marginalized
histories.

Other titles in the Nonfictions series:

Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties by Dave Saunders

Vision On: Film, Television, and the Arts in Britain by John Wyver

The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture Edited
by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas

Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch Edited by Joram ten Brink

Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television by Timothy Boon

Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice Edited by Alan Grossman

and Áine O’Brien

Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video by Keith Beattie

Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: A Case Study of Politics and the Media
by Rod Stoneman

The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film by Laura Rascaroli

Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary Cinema

by Thomas Cohen

The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary Edited by Alisa Lebow

Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the Performance of Violence

Edited by Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer

Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film

by Iván Villarmea Álvarez

Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary by Paolo Magagnoli

Mediating Mobility: Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration by Steffen Köhn

Projecting Race: Postwar America, Civil Rights, and Documentary Film

by Stephen Charbonneau

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia Edited by Elizabeth Papazian and Caroline Eades

I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary Edited by

Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose

Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary by Raya Morag

FILMING HISTORY
FROM BELOW

MICROHISTORICAL
D O C U M E N TA R I E S

E F R É N C U E VA S

Wallflower
New York
 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cuevas, Efrén, author.
Title: Filming history from below : microhistorical documentaries / Efrén Cuevas.
Description: New York : Wallflower, an imprint of Columbia University Press,
[2021] | Series: Nonfictions | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021023335 (print) | LCCN 2021023336 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231195973 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231195966 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780231551571 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Documentary films—History and criticism. |
History in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 C74 2021 (print) |
LCC PN1995.9.D6 (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023335
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023336

Columbia University Press books are printed

on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Cover images: Film stills from The Maelstrom, 1997, © Péter Forgács
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

INTRODUCTION: FILM AND HISTORY

1. MICROHISTORY AND DOCUMENTARY FILM

14

2. THE ARCHIVE IN THE

MICROHISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY

41

3. PÉTER FORGÁCS’S HOME MOVIE CHRONICLE

OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE MAELSTROM,
FREE FALL, AND CLASS LOT

65
 viCO NTENTS

4. THE INCARCERATION OF JAPANESE AMERICANS

DURING WORLD WAR II: SOMETHING STRONG WITHIN,
A FAMILY GATHERING, FROM A SILK COCOON,
AND HISTORY AND MEMORY

95

5. RITHY PANH’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

NARRATIVE OF THE CAMBODIAN GENOCIDE:
THE MISSING PICTURE

127

6. IDENTITIES AND CONFLICTS IN ISRAEL AND

PALESTINE: ISRAEL: A HOME MOVIE, FOR
MY CHILDREN, MY TERRORIST, MY LAND ZION, AND
A WORLD NOT OURS

152

7. THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN

JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

188

EPILOGUE: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

221

Filmography 231
Notes 233
Bibliography 263
Index 277
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
his book began taking shape as a specific project in 2017, but it
has a prehistory that dates back to 1998, when José Luis Guerín’s
film Tren de sombras sparked my interest in the use of home
movies in contemporary cinema. I began developing this interest further
during two short stays (in 2000 and 2001) at the Anthology Film
Archives, where I enjoyed the hospitality of Robert Haller and Jonas
Mekas, and where I began studying the work of the latter in depth—
research that served as the foundation for the last chapter of this book. A
few years later I would sketch out the connections between home movies,
documentary film, and microhistory in an article published in 2007 in
the journal Secuencias. The book I edited in 2010, La casa abierta: El cine
doméstico y sus reciclajes contemporáneos (The open house: Home mov-
ies and their contemporary recycling), with the support of Documenta
Madrid and Antonio Delgado, represented another important step, as
although its focus is different, it contains many related elements.1 Over
the years my research has been enriched by other filmmakers and film-
ographies that have made the exploration of this relationship more com-
plex, leading to presentations at conferences such as Visible Evidence,
SCMS, IAMHIST, and NECS, and to various publications, some of which
appear in this book in updated versions. Specifically, chapter 1 is par-
tially based on an article published in the journal Historia Social, while
chapter 2 is based in part on a chapter published in the book Amateur
 viiiAC K NOW LE D GM E N TS

Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, and on an article
published in Studies in Documentary Film, and chapter 7 is based on an
article published in Biography.2 I am grateful to these journals and pub-
lishers for having given me the opportunity to share my research.
While researching and writing this book, my work has benefited from
the contributions of various colleagues with shared interests, through
conversations, reading parts of the book, or helping me locate different
films. In particular, I would like to thank Robert Rosenstone, Vicente
Sánchez-Biosca, Philip Rosen, Stefano Odorico, Anacleto Pons, Deirdre
Boyle, and Ohad Landesman. I am also grateful for the support of the
filmmakers who gave me access to their films and/or shared their cre-
ative processes with me in interviews, especially Péter Forgács, but also
Karen Ishizuka, Rithy Panh, Michal Aviad, Mahdi Fleifel, Pia Andell,
and the late Jonas Mekas.
I also wish to thank Columbia University, and my host there, Jane
Gaines, as it was during my stay as a visiting scholar at Columbia that
this project came into being in its current form. Special thanks are also
due to Universidad de Navarra for their continuous support for my
research through the PIUNA research projects and for the sabbatical
they granted me to work at Columbia University. My department col-
leagues at Universidad de Navarra have been essential travel companions
on this journey, especially the members of my research group, Lourdes
Esqueda, Julieta Keldjian, María del Rincón, and Carlos Muguiro.
I would like to gratefully acknowledge Columbia University Press for
supporting this project, and especially Ryan Groendyk for his advice and
support throughout the publishing process. A special mention is also
warranted for the translator of the parts of this book originally written
in Spanish, Martin Boyd, for his professionalism and rigor.
My deepest gratitude goes, of course, to my family and friends (includ-
ing the “overlookers,” “alemanes,” and “mendebalderos”) for having
made this journey so much easier. On these occasions, I am always
reminded of Joseph J. Rotman’s amusing book dedication, which could
be paraphrased here as: “To my family and friends, without whom this
book would have been completed two years earlier.”
F I L M I N G H I STO RY F R O M B E LOW
 INTRODUCTION

Film and History

I
n 2016 I was invited by Professor Jane Gaines to give a class on Péter
Forgács’s film The Maelstrom at Columbia University. After the
screening, a student who identified himself as of Jewish descent said
that the film had impacted him more than any other he had seen before
about the Holocaust. This anecdote came back to me sometime later,
when, while rereading the book History on Film/Film on History, I came
upon this statement by its author, Robert Rosenstone, about another
Forgács film, El Perro Negro: “Of all of the documentaries I have seen on
the conflict [the Spanish Civil War], this is the one that, after years of
study, I find the most startling and provocative, a commentary on the
others and all that I know about the war.”1 It surprised me that for that
student and this researcher, two films based on the home movies of
unknown individuals could be the most convincing representations on
film of these two historical events. What is so special about the story of
the Peereboom family, the Salvans family, or Eduardo Noriega? Or per-
haps it would be more appropriate to ask what is so special about Forgács’s
way of working with this archival footage that vests these materials with
such historiographical depth, with an approach that can legitimately be
described as microhistorical. Considering Forgács’s films from this per-
spective requires the acceptance of two assertions that are effectively
articulated in this book. The first is that documentaries can record his-
tory, that they can investigate the past and contribute knowledge of their
 2INTRO D U C TIO N

own to complement the work of written history done by professional his-

torians. The second is that there is a type of documentary film that does
this with a microhistorical perspective, which in this book will be
referred to as microhistorical documentary.
This second assertion constitutes the central theme of this book and is
explored more specifically in the first chapter. In this introduction, I
therefore focus on the first, of film as a medium for constructing history,
and of filmmakers as historians. This is the main thesis that justifies and
underpins studies of film and history, a field that has grown considerably
since it first emerged as a subject of academic research in the 1970s.
Indeed, it has now become a field of study in its own right, with more
than one hundred books published in different languages, an association
of its own (the International Association for Media and History), and
two journals dedicated to it: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Televi-
sion, and Film and History.2 Further evidence of its growth and diversifi-
cation can be found in the monographs about film and history studies in
the Franco-Italian context by Tiziana M. Di Blasio and in the English-
speaking world by Mia E. M. Treacey, which trace its development back
to the very earliest days of cinema.3 It has become something of a cliché
for these kinds of studies to cite the brief manifesto published in 1898 by
Bolesław Matuszewski, advocating for the establishment of a Cinemato-
graphic Museum or Depository where footage documenting historical
events could be stored for future scholars, effectively changing cinema
(“animated photography”) “from a simple pastime to an agreeable method
of studying the past.” 4 Nevertheless, after the obligatory reference to Kra-
cauer’s book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the Ger-
man Film (1947), most scholars locate the origins of this field of academic
study in the 1970s, with the work of the French researchers Marc Ferro
and Pierre Sorlin. The work of these two authors was highly influential
thanks to their publications in English, with Ferro’s Cinema et histoire
(1977) translated into English in 1988, and Sorlin’s The Film in History:
Restaging the Past published in 1980.5 In the English-speaking world,
although the British historian Paul Smith edited the influential anthol-
ogy The Historian and Film back in 1976, it would probably be the American
Robert Rosenstone who has become the most prominent scholar in the
field, with numerous publications since the 1980s, the most comprehen-
sive being his book History on Film/Film on History, published in 2006.6
 INTRO D U C TIO N3

Most of the studies by these authors, and by others who have followed
in their wake, focus on fiction film, with two traditional lines of research.
One line is concerned with the study of “historical films,” meaning films
that recreate or depict past eras as a central theme of their storylines and
not for merely decorative purposes. An increasing number of historians
have taken an interest in these types of films, partly for their potential
use for educational purposes, but the focus has often been on analyzing
their historical accuracy, applying traditional research standards to the
depiction of the past offered in these films. Authors like Rosenstone have
criticized this approach, which they consider reductionist, as it ignores
the fact that historical fiction films—which Rosenstone refers to as “his-
tory films”—follow different rules of construction from professional his-
tory, without this meaning that they fail to offer valid information on the
past.7 The other line of study examines fiction films as social documents,
as Sorlin asserts at the beginning of The Film in History, when he defines
his object of study as “the cinema considered as a document of social his-
tory that . . . aims primarily at illuminating the way in which individuals
and groups of people understand their own time.”8 Films are thus con-
sidered from the perspective of social and cultural history, as sociocul-
tural artifacts that, beyond their specific storylines, usually convey the
dominant axiological framework of their time and place of production.
This is also highlighted in another of the seminal works in this field,
American History/American Film, published in 1979, whose editors,
John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson, identify the book’s objective
as studying each specific film to show “how its visual text as well as the
details of its production, release, and reception, relate to the broader his-
torical and cultural questions of the day.”9
These two lines of research share a primordial interest in mainstream
films, as it is these that can most influence our vision of the present time
or of past periods (in the case of historical cinema). Sometimes these
authors also take an interest in more alternative, independent, or experi-
mental films, where they find different ways of recording history. In this
context, it is worth mentioning Rosenstone’s interest in filmic modes
that reflect a postmodern historiographical approach, which is discussed
later in this book, or Antoine de Baecque’s proposition of three vectors in
the relationship between film and history: reconstruction (of the typical
historical fiction film), archive (the film as document, whether fictional
 4INTRO D U C TIO N

or documentary), and interpretation, which is expressed more clearly in

the kind of essay film that makes use of montage, like Jean-Luc Godard’s
film Histoire(s) de cinéma (1988).10
Notwithstanding their different interests in the study of the relation-
ship between film and history, all these authors agree that filmmakers
can record history, that when they examine the past through their films
they can be considered historians. There is no such consensus on this
point among professional historians, who in many cases continue to believe
that cinema—and especially mainstream cinema—has nothing to do
with the professional recording of history. However, the notion of the
filmmaker as historian is undisputed among scholars of film and history.
Robert B. Toplin asserted it clearly as early as 1988: “One of the first tasks
for consideration is to recognize producers, directors, writers, and edi-
tors for what they have become—historians.”11 Toplin’s assertion was
published in a forum on film and history in the prestigious history jour-
nal the American Historical Review, a fact that was considered at the time
to be especially symbolic, as it signaled an openness among professional
historians to serious consideration of cinema as a vehicle for history. The
forum in question opened with an article by Rosenstone, which stressed
one of his key ideas: the complementary rather than contradictory rela-
tionship between audiovisual history and written history.12 He would
explain this idea more clearly in History on Film/Film on History: “This
visual form of historical thinking should not and cannot be judged by
the criteria we apply to the history that is produced on the page” because
it possesses “its own set of rules and procedures for creating works with
their own historical integrity, works which relate to, comment upon, and
often challenge the world of written history.”13 In short, as he goes onto
explain, “to accept film makers as historians . . . is to accept a new sort of
history. . . . In terms of informational content, intellectual density, or
theoretical insight, film will always be less complex than written history.
Yet its moving images and soundscapes will create experiential and emo-
tional complexities of a sort unknown upon the printed page.”14 It is this
last idea, which Rosenstone continues to consider mainly in relation to
mainstream fiction film, that is the most interesting, as it points to the
different level of complexity that films offer in their exploration of the
past, as is shown throughout this book. Rosenstone further explores this
different form of access to the past achieved by cinema, concluding that
 INTRO D U CTIO N5

“the historical world created by film is potentially much more complex

than written text. On the screen, several things occur simultaneously—
image, sound, language, even text—elements that suggest and work
against each other to create a realm of meaning as different from written
history as written was from oral history.”15 This difference in the form of
access to the past is what led Hayden White, in the same forum in 1988,
to propose a new term for this field, “historiophoty,” which he defines as
“the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images
and filmic discourse.”16 Despite its expressive concision, it is a term that
has not been widely adopted in the academic literature.
In his 1988 article White stresses that any objections that may be made
by professional historians to the versions of history offered by cinema are
questionable, as they seem to overlook the fact that written history is
itself a representation of the past, a construction with its own rules of
operation. On this point he asserts that “every written history is a prod-
uct of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and
qualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed repre-
sentation. It is only the medium that differs, not the way in which mes-
sages are produced.”17 Toplin posits a similar idea in the article cited
above when he points out that the gulf between filmmakers and profes-
sional historians is not as wide as the latter might perceive them. This is
also a point that would be reiterated years later by Jennie M. Carlsten and
Fearghal McGarry, who observe with a hint of irony that “historians
share more in common with filmmakers than they care to concede. In
choosing a subject to represent, deciding how to conceptualise it, identi-
fying source materials to illustrate it, and foregrounding key themes to
signify its historical significance to a contemporary audience, the histo-
rian follows similar methodologies to the filmmaker.”18
As noted above, studies of film and history focus mainly on main-
stream cinema and especially on fiction films. The surprising lack of
research on history and documentary film is sometimes explained as
being due to the fact that the connection between the two is more obvi-
ous and less controversial. While it is true that more exhaustive studies,
like the aforementioned book History on Film/Film on History or Marnie
Hughes-Warrington’s History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on
Film, do include specific chapters dedicated to documentary film,19 the
references to it most commonly deal with informational documentaries.
 6 INTRO D U CTIO N

Such films would fall into the category of expository documentaries, as

defined by Bill Nichols, which raises clear problems for those historians
skeptical about the ability of film to investigate the past,20 due largely to
the fact that the main function of this type of documentary is to present
historical information to a general audience. This usually means that
their intended purpose is not to conduct research into the past but rather
to disseminate research previously conducted by professional historians.
But apart from informational documentaries, the range of documenta-
ries that explore the past is actually quite wide, as is the range of
approaches they take: experimental, autobiographical, essayistic, and so
on. The most significant cases of such documentaries have been analyzed
by scholars in film studies from various perspectives.21 However, special-
ists in film and history have rarely studied them. Among the few who
have is Rosenstone, who has taken an interest in films such as El Perro
Negro, Far from Poland, and History and Memory, as he finds that the
postulates of a postmodern history are better reflected in these films
than they are in written history.22
The microhistorical documentaries analyzed in this book are among
the wide range of documentaries that examine the past from their own
perspective, and not just with the aim of disseminating preexisting
research. They can be understood as bridges between two fields that con-
tinue to run along relatively parallel lines, as they combine elements of
cinema and of professional written history. These documentaries are
constructed with the tools of the filmmaker, with the different expressive
layers of sound and image that give them a complexity all their own.
Additionally, in contrast to written history, they benefit from cinema’s
unique capacity to show the places and, in the case of contemporary his-
tory, the protagonists of their stories—through archival footage, or, if
they are still alive, interviews—which provide access to the past with a
powerful emotional charge, reinforced by all the other elements of filmic
language. But, at the same time, these films are constructed with strate-
gies and methods also used in written history, in a thorough research
process, with the support of witnesses and experts (who may or may not
appear in the film) and a detailed examination of archival sources
(according special importance to audiovisual archives). Microhistorical
documentaries also eschew the omniscient perspective generally adopted
in informational documentaries to explore the past via alternative routes
 INTRO D U C TIO N7

that may include questioning the research processes, exposing the con-
structed nature of the historical narrative, and working with archival
sources with a critical approach, conscious of the fact that archives are
not mere repositories of the past but the result of a consolidation of his-
torical processes with specific agendas.
Obviously, the methodologies of the microhistorical documentary
and written history are by no means identical. Standard written history
conforms to specific parameters in its use of sources and its research
and writing processes, while microhistorical documentaries construct
their discourse on the past with a combination of conventional historio-
graphical tools and creative resources unique to filmic language. Along
these same lines, these documentaries do not literally incorporate the
modes and methods of microhistory as it has been practiced in its con-
ventional written form. However, the term “microhistorical” is not used
here in a metaphorical sense or as if microhistorical documentaries
were merely inspired by written microhistory. The application of the
term here is best described as analogical (in a classical sense of this
term, related to the notion of analogy of proportionality), entailing a
common meaning for all the subjects of which it is predicated, while
also possessing another meaning specific to each subject. In this sense,
the microhistorical status of these documentaries arises from their
position within specific parameters, defined by the main features of this
historiographical approach understood in its most widely accepted
sense. At the same time, these documentaries possess characteristics
not present in written microhistory that contribute to their microhis-
torical status, associated not only with their audiovisual nature but also
with other specific features, such as their quality as history of the pres-
ent, the significant role they give to personal and collective memory,
and the autobiographical perspectives that they often contain. It is also
important to clarify that the generic category of microhistorical docu-
mentary includes films attuned in different ways to this category, as is
pointed out throughout this book, resulting in differing degrees to
which they may be characterized as microhistorical: from the most par-
adigmatic case—the films of Péter Forgács—to the most unorthodox—
the diary films of Jonas Mekas.

R
 8 INTRO D U CTIO N

Filming History from Below is divided into seven chapters. The first two
explore theoretical aspects of microhistorical film, while the other five
focus on individual case studies. Each case study is placed within its his-
torical context sufficiently to clarify its contribution as a microhistorical
chronicle of a specific era, nation, or social group, but this necessary con-
textualization is not intended to constitute an exhaustive analysis of the
history of the country or social group in question, as such an analysis is
far beyond the scope of this book’s objective. Three of these chapters
focus on the work of a specific filmmaker (Péter Forgács, Rithy Panh,
and Jonas Mekas); the other two deal with explorations of a specific his-
torical event or period from various perspectives. These five case studies
have been chosen for their diversity and for the evidence each one offers
of the possibilities of the microhistorical documentary form. The diver-
sity is reflected in the countries covered, including the United States,
Hungary, the Netherlands, Israel, Palestine, and Cambodia; in the time
period represented, from the 1930s through to the first decade of the
twenty-first century; and in their varied structures, ranging from collec-
tive portraits to autobiographical films to diary films. This book also
combines analysis of filmmakers who are well-known among scholars of
documentary cinema, such as Forgács, Pahn, and Mekas, and films
belonging to a kind of canon, such as The Maelstrom, History and Mem-
ory, The Missing Picture, and Lost, Lost, Lost, with other films that are
lesser known outside their specific geographical or social context, such
as Class Lot, Something Strong Within, From a Silk Cocoon, For My Chil-
dren, and A World Not Ours.
Each chapter focuses on just one or a few films, although occasionally
other related films are discussed or analyzed briefly. In total, a close
analysis is offered of fourteen films. The practice of close analysis poses
the problem of how to describe the different scenes and the filmic strate-
gies used therein, as it is not always easy to avoid descriptions that may
be unnecessary for readers who know the film well, and at the same time
insufficient for readers who have never seen the film or do not recall it
well. To address this issue, for readers with current access to the films,
when a specific scene is discussed, the minute of the film where it appears
is included.
The common thread in the analysis of these films and filmmakers is
the examination of the microhistorical features of each film and the
 INTRO D U C TIO N9

historical chronicle that emerges from their approaches. However, in dif-

ferent chapters I also draw on other methodologies and contributions
from related fields to complement this analysis, ranging from studies of
autobiography applied to cinema to Michel de Certeau’s and Alf Lüdtke’s
theories of everyday life, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and
Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotopic analysis. In addition, I have sought to
integrate the work of researchers writing in different languages, particu-
larly in English and Spanish, along with significant attention to studies
in French, and more sporadically in other languages like Italian or
Portuguese.
The chapters presenting the case studies are ordered according to a
certain logic. The chapter dedicated to the work of Péter Forgács appears
first because I consider it the most paradigmatic case of a documentary
filmography with a microhistorical perspective. Conversely, the chapter
dedicated to Jonas Mekas and his diary films has been placed at the end
because his work is the most historiographically unorthodox, and there-
fore the most suitable for exploring the creative boundaries of this cate-
gory of films. However, this criterion has not been applied to determine
the order of the other three case studies, as to do so would entail attempt-
ing to pigeonhole them artificially within a supposed scale of relevance
that would be difficult to justify. Instead, I have simply alternated the
cases related to individual filmmakers (third, fifth, and seventh chapters)
with those focusing on a historical event or period explored from differ-
ent perspectives (fourth and sixth chapters).
The first chapter, “Microhistory and Documentary Film,” presents the
theoretical/analytical framework used for the analysis of the different
case studies. Following a brief outline of the features of written micro-
history, based chiefly on the work of its most prominent exponents, Carlo
Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, this chapter examines the main features of
microhistorical documentaries (shared with written microhistory): an
exploration of the past with a reduced scale of observation; a prioritizing
of human agency; the use of narrative structures; and a conjectural
appropriation of archival sources, which are usually limited because
the focus is generally on individuals outside of public history. The chap-
ter also includes an examination of the contributions offered by every-
day life studies—with a brief outline of theories by Simmel, Benjamin,
and Kracauer—and an overview of the role of personal memory and
 10 INTRO D U C TIO N

autobiographical perspectives, questions that are further explored in

subsequent chapters.
Chapter 2 examines the use of archival materials in microhistorical
documentaries. It begins with a discussion of the new understanding of
archives that has emerged since the archival turn in history and archival
studies, which has opened up their use to other disciplines, such as art,
photography, and cinema. This serves to contextualize the use of archi-
val sources in this kind of documentary, which obviously focuses more
on audio/visual materials. The main singularity of microhistorical docu-
mentaries lies in the importance they accord to family archives, with an
emphasis on snapshots and, especially, home movies. Audio/visual fam-
ily archives are therefore the main focus of this chapter, which offers an
analysis of their characteristics, proposes three basic modes of appro-
priation (naturalization, contrast, and historicization), and examines the
most common structures found in films based on such archives (the col-
lective portrait and the family history).
Chapter 3 deals with the films of Péter Forgács. This Hungarian film-
maker has produced an unquestionably coherent body of work in terms
of both thematic content and style, based on home movies and amateur
films that he reuses to construct microhistorical narratives, usually set in
Europe between the 1930s and 1970s. To analyze his work, the chapter
begins with a brief typology of his films and the historical chronicles
they offer. This is followed by an analysis of his three films that most
effectively embody a microhistorical perspective: The Maelstrom, Free
Fall, and Class Lot. The first of these, perhaps his best-known film, pres-
ents the Shoah through the home movies of a Jewish Dutch family, the
Peerebooms, contrasted with the home movies of the Reich Commis-
sioner for Occupied Dutch Territories, Artur Seyss-Inquart. The other
two films document the life of the Hungarian Jew György Pető, based on
the home movies he filmed from the 1930s up to the end of the 1960s:
Free Fall constructs a narrative in a certain sense parallel to that of The
Maelstrom, but this time located in Hungary; while Class Lot continues
the narrative after the end of World War II, focusing now on a microhis-
torical view of the communist regime established at that time.
The fourth chapter presents a study of documentaries that investigate
the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II from a
microhistorical perspective. It begins with an analysis of Something
 INTRO D U C TIO N11

Strong Within, a film made using the home movies of different Japanese
Americans interned in the camps, but without the inclusion of inter-
views of the home moviemakers or other strategies to identify them indi-
vidually. The film thus offers a collective portrait of life in this ethnic
community under such painful historical circumstances, presenting an
atypical variation on microhistory, as the scale of observation is reduced
but not focused on a specific individual or family. The other three films
analyzed in this chapter do focus on specific families, in the form of
autobiographies of the female filmmakers who made them: A Family
Gathering, From a Silk Cocoon, and History and Memory. Of the three
films, it is the last that offers the most experimental format, in a complex
combination of family chronicle and film essay about the ways of repre-
senting the past through audiovisual media.
The fifth chapter again focuses on an individual filmmaker: the Cam-
bodian director Rithy Panh, internationally renowned for his films about
the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodian
people between 1975 and 1979. The analysis in this chapter focuses on his
most accomplished work on this subject: The Missing Picture. The chap-
ter begins with a brief overview of his previous films, Bophana, S-21: The
Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, and Duch: Master of the Forgers of Hell,
all of which contain certain microhistorical resonances. The analysis
then turns to The Missing Picture, which offers a complex palimpsest of
temporal layers, visual and sound sources, and historiographical per-
spectives. The film is dominated by the autobiographical approach of the
filmmaker, who as a youth suffered through this terrible period that he
now explores from a microhistorical perspective. But Panh adds various
layers to this autobiographical portrait to offer a basic narrative on the
macrohistorical context, but above all to construct an essayistic dis-
course that deconstructs the official narrative of the Khmer Rouge and
interrogates the role of memory and archives in the construction of
history.
The sixth chapter returns to the study of a historical event from differ-
ent microhistorical perspectives, in this case the Palestinian-Israeli con-
flict and the narratives of national identity that feed the conflict, from
the 1930s through to the present day. The first of the films analyzed,
Israel: A Home Movie, offers another collective portrait based on home
movies, this time of Israel during the decades when small-gauge cameras
 12INTRO D U C TIO N

were in common use. What may initially seem like a typical microhis-
torical perspective on the past ends up being more ambiguous due to the
attention given to portraying macrohistorical events. The other four
films are articulated around autobiographical portraits, giving signifi-
cant importance to the present, from which they interrogate the past of
their countries and the future that awaits their families. In the Israeli
case, an analysis is offered of the work of two female filmmakers with
somewhat parallel life stories: Michal Aviad and Julie Cohen. Aviad’s
film For My Children is an excellent example of the combination of scales
and historical temporalities. Cohen addresses similar themes in My Ter-
rorist and My Land Zion, the latter of which leans toward an essayistic
approach. The Palestinian perspective is explored chiefly through a close
analysis of A World Not Ours, a film in which Mahdi Fleifel deals with
the lives of refugees through the specific experience of the Ain el-Helweh
camp in Lebanon.
Chapter 7 deals with the microhistorical perspective of Jonas Mekas’s
diary films, with a special focus on Lost, Lost, Lost. The chapter begins
with an analysis of the particular features of the diary film as an expres-
sive mode and of Mekas’s specific approach to it. This is followed by a
brief analysis of Reminiscences, and then by a close analysis of Lost, Lost,
Lost, the Mekas film that contains his most explicit exploration of the
past. In this film, the Lithuanian filmmaker offers a chronicle of his pro-
cess of integration into the United States, from his first years when he
was closely associated with the community of Lithuanians who had
immigrated to the country after World War II to his progressive integra-
tion into the community of independent and avant-garde filmmakers in
New York City, which is also documented in his film diaries. Based on a
chronotopic analysis that draws on Bakhtinian theory, this study of Lost,
Lost, Lost offers an opportunity to assess the potential of the microhis-
torical perspective applied to films with a strong personal stamp that
may at first appear to be unrelated to a historiographical approach.
The book concludes with an epilogue that offers a brief reflection on
the future of the microhistorical documentary in a context where the
technology and the medium itself is changing quickly. Notable among
the new developments are interactive documentaries (or “i-docs”), pre-
sented on multimedia platforms, with nonlinear structures. Some i-docs
offer interesting contributions to microhistory, especially when they
 INTRO D U CTIO N13

involve collective portraits, as do Hidden Like Anne Frank or Jerusalem,

We Are Here. In any case, the future of the microhistorical documentary
is difficult to predict, as the digital turn is also significantly affecting the
way that historians and archivists work. In relation to family archives,
which are key to this type of documentary, the proliferation of photos
and home videos goes hand in hand with the uncertainty about their
preservation and accessibility in the long term. Nevertheless, it seems
likely that the exponential growth of the family archive in the digital era
will open up new and exciting possibilities for the microhistorical
documentary.
 1
MICROHISTORY AND DOCUMENTARY FILM

T
he proposal of the term “microhistorical documentary” to clas-
sify certain films requires a prior contextualization, a task that is
complicated by the fact that this book is aimed at researchers of
both history and documentary cinema. With this challenge in mind, I
begin with a discussion of a related field, everyday life studies (with a brief
overview of some precursors to this field: the works of Georg Simmel,
Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer), which contributes some inter-
esting ideas that inform the subsequent analysis of the case studies. I follow
with an examination of a concept that is prima facie more specific, “micro-
history,” on the assumption that the reader already has sufficient under-
standing of the field of documentary cinema. After this two-part contex-
tualization, I focus on the definition and main features of microhistorical
documentaries, and conclude with a discussion on the relationship between
memory and microhistory in autobiographical practice, an approach that
is central to a number of the films analyzed in this book.1

RELAT E D CON TEXTS: EVERYDAY LI FE ST U DI ES,

SIMMEL , BEN JA MIN , K R AC AUER

Everyday life studies is a field located at the intersection between soci-

ology, anthropology, and cultural studies. The connection between the
 M I C RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM1 5

history of everyday life (which, understood in its broadest sense, could

also include microhistory) and the sociology of everyday life appears
obvious from the outset, but in fact there has been very little real dia-
logue between these two disciplines. Notable among the very few
authors who connect the two fields is John Brewer, who, in his study of
microhistory and the histories of everyday life, identifies “the critical
cultural theory . . . that runs from Georg Lukàcs, through the Surreal-
ists, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Henri Lefebvre and the Situa-
tionist International (notably Guy Debord) to Michel de Certeau” as
one of the traditions out of which the new interest in everyday life has
emerged.2 The sociologist Juan Gracia Cárcamo also discusses this
relationship explicitly, acknowledging that dialogue between the two
disciplines is uncommon, despite the fact that the growing interest
among historians in these issues has a “more or less direct correlation
with the perspectives that have been a source of discussion among soci-
ologists who have taken an interest in the study of everyday life.”3 The
rise of social and cultural history has certainly resulted in increasing
exploration by historians of approaches like the history of representa-
tions, the history of popular culture, and microhistory, which in a way
run parallel to the growing interest among sociologists and anthropol-
ogists in everyday life, although explicit connections between these
approaches are still rare.
It is not my purpose here, in any case, to force synergies but to point to
ways in which everyday life studies could reinforce historiographical
approaches, specifically those related to microhistorical documentaries.
To this end, the work of Ben Highmore—developed in the context of
cultural theory—is particularly useful because of his way of framing and
studying the most prominent scholars in this field. Highmore examines
their work based on three clusters of questions related to aesthetics,
archives, and critical practices, which exhibit some interesting parallels
with the matters explored in the following chapters. Indeed, archives are
the specific subject of the second chapter, mainly due to the prominent
role played in this type of documentary by family archives, with their
representation of everyday life in contemporary societies. The aesthetic
dimension is also very visible in the work of the filmmakers employing a
microhistorical perspective, which combines historiographical rigor
with a creative approach, using the different expressive techniques of
cinematic language to propose a critical practice in film form.
 1 6 M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

In relation to the first of these three clusters, aesthetics, Highmore

foregrounds the way that avant-garde artists “locate and apprehend
modern everyday life” and “find forms that are capable of articulating
it.” 4 Among these forms, he highlights the ones proposed by surrealism
and montage, for their capacity for defamiliarizing everyday situations
and objects in order to represent them in all their complexities and con-
tradictions: “Aesthetic techniques, such as the surprising juxtapositions
supplied by surrealism, provide a productive resource for rescuing the
everyday from conventional habits of mind. Similarly, if the everyday is
conventionally perceived as homogeneous, forms of artistic montage
work to disturb such ‘smooth surfaces.’ ”5 Echoes of these associations
can certainly be seen in Jonas Mekas’s work, which is analyzed in the
chapter 7, but also, albeit less explicitly, in the films of Péter Forgács or
Rea Tajiri. Highmore places the second cluster of questions, related to
archives, in relation to the tension between the impossible nature of
recording the totality of everyday life and the need to avoid undocu-
mented generalizations. Here he introduces the question of scales of
observation that would subsequently become so central to microhistory:
the dilemma between “the microscopic levels (most frequently classed as
everyday) and macroscopic levels of the totality (culture, society and so
on).” 6 In this context, an urgent need arises to make the everyday visible,
to rescue it from the oblivion to which the grand narratives habitually
consign it. To do this, it is important to understand the everyday as a
critical practice and as a form of practical criticism, which is the focus of
the third set of questions proposed by Highmore. In this way, everyday
life can be brought into the light, inverting the most common modes
of representation: “Instead of picturing the world as a drama of signifi-
cant (and exceptional) events and people, set against a backdrop of every-
day life, the relation between foreground and background needs to be
reversed.”7
With this framework, Highmore selects particular authors and
themes to offer an overview of everyday life studies. Among these, it is
worth commenting briefly here on the contributions of Georg Simmel,
Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer. All three of these authors pub-
lished their work before the consolidation of everyday life studies in its
more institutional and academic form, which may explain why their
approaches are more transdisciplinary, with interesting echoes for
 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM1 7

historiographical studies of everyday life, as Harry D. Harootunian and

John Brewer point out.8 Brewer actually places all three of them in direct
dialogue with microhistory: “[Carlo] Ginzburg’s approach can be seen as
part of a general concern among students of everyday life for small things
and discrete particulars, a preoccupation going back to the brilliant
essays of Georg Simmel but also found in the writings of Walter Benja-
min and Siegfried Kracauer (whom Ginzburg speaks of as an indirect
‘influence’).”9
Georg Simmel’s work spans the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and would influence key thinkers in the decades that followed,
including Benjamin and Kracauer. Often identified as a forerunner of
microsociology, Simmel bases his approach on a vindication of the
microscopic scale for studying society. In opposition to classical sociol-
ogy, concerned with the most visible social structures, Simmel argues for
studying everyday interactions “between the atoms of society, accessible
only to psychological microscopy, which support the entire tenacity and
elasticity, the entire variety and uniformity of this so evident and yet so
puzzling life of society.”10 In this microscopic analysis of society, Simmel
also discovers a macroscopic dimension, in a clash of sociological scales
of observation hinted at already in his early essay “Sociological Aesthet-
ics”: “For us the essence of aesthetic observation and interpretation lies
in the fact that the typical is to be found in what is unique, the law-like in
what is fortuitous, the essence and significance of things in the superfi-
cial and transitory.”11 For David Frisby, one of the most renowned schol-
ars of Simmel’s work, this emphasis on the fragmentary, the fortuitous,
the transitory effectively unites this author with Benjamin and Kracauer
in a common approach to their understanding of modernity: “They all
sought, as it were, to complete the fragment, indeed to redeem it aes-
thetically, politically or historically. . . . Simmel’s ‘fortuitous fragments
of reality,’ Kracauer’s ‘insignificant superficial manifestations’ and Ben-
jamin’s ‘dialectical images’ or ‘monads’ all redeemed the smallest, most
insignificant traces of modernity in the everyday world.”12
The focus on the fragmentary appears again in the work of Walter
Benjamin, very prominently in his famous unfinished Arcades Project
(Passagenwerk). Although Benjamin’s work actually predates everyday
life studies by many years, his ideas are particularly interesting since
they are posited in dialogue with his historiographical work and in
 1 8M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O C U MEN TA RY FI LM

connection with new forms of representation like cinema. This interest

in the fragmentary and the anecdotal is for Brewer precisely what consti-
tutes a clear connection with historian Carlo Ginzburg’s proposals related
to the “evidential paradigm,” which are analyzed below, and which he
relates to Benjamin’s (and Kracauer’s) focus “on ephemera, fragments,
anecdotes (the literary form that punctures narrative), ‘insignificant
details’ and ‘superficial manifestations’ to achieve what Benjamin called
‘profane illumination.’ ”13 Benjamin’s approach is not microhistorical
either, but he seems to point in that direction quite clearly when he pro-
poses “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the
crystal of the total event” or “to assemble large-scale constructions out of
the smallest and most precisely cut components.”14
With these fragments otherwise considered insignificant, Benjamin
proposes to construct a dialectical history based on the principle of mon-
tage. Herein lies the importance for Benjamin of the concept of the “dia-
lectical image,” in which the historicity of the everyday enters into legi-
bility, as Highmore suggests. Highmore explains Benjamin’s dialectical
image as a montage of elements, “a collage practice that can arrange the
materiality of modernity into a design that awakens it from its dreams-
cape and opens it out on to history.”15 Harootunian also stresses this
connection posited in Benjamin’s work between everydayness and his-
tory, in the explicit context of his analysis of modernity: “Thus moder-
nity, especially everyday existence and experience, becomes the site
where the past is always situated in the present and where differing forms
of historical consciousness constantly commingle and interact.”16
Another interesting aspect of Benjamin’s work is the role he assigns to
contemporary art and to new modes of representation, such as photogra-
phy and cinema, in the task of rendering everyday experience visible,
giving it a political articulation and transforming it into a historical
experience. Benjamin takes a special interest in surrealism, in the work
of Charles Baudelaire and Bertolt Brecht, and in cinema. What interested
him in cinema was mainly the role of montage, in keeping with the
importance he gave to this concept in his interpretation of history.17 But
his reflections on cinema sometimes take on unexpected suggestions of a
microhistorical sensibility, as can be seen in his essay “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:
 M I CRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM1 9

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of

familiar objects, by exploring common-place milieus under the inge-
nious guidance of the camera, the film . . . extends our comprehension
of the necessities which rule our lives. . . . With the close-up, space
expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of
a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was
visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of
the subject.18

As can be seen in this last sentence, Benjamin was formulating an idea

remarkably similar to what Jacques Revel or Paul Ricoeur would propose
in relation to the transformations that occur when the scale of observa-
tion is changed, as is explained below.
Together with Simmel and Benjamin, another important figure in
this context is Siegfried Kracauer, with a similar understanding of every-
day life, as Harootunian suggests: “Much as Simmel and Benjamin had
done, Kracauer’s apparent return to the concrete immediacy of everyday
life concentrated on the fragments, the leavings of life.”19 Kracauer’s
work covers numerous fields, including cultural criticism, sociology, film
theory, and historiography. His earliest sociological work already
revealed an interest in the study of everyday life, as can be seen in The
Mass Ornament (1927) and The Salaried Masses (1930).20 Although he was
not strictly speaking a professional historian, even in those early years he
demonstrated an understanding of reality that comes close to a historical
perspective. This is evident in the first of these texts, when he argues, in
a proposition with microhistorical resonances, that “the position that an
epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strik-
ingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions
than from that epoch’s judgments about itself.”21
In the field of film studies, Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption
of Physical Reality, published later in his career (1960), constitutes a clas-
sic work on film realism. As its central thesis, indicated in the subtitle,
Kracauer argues that a main function of cinema is to redeem physical,
material reality from a lethargic state of virtual nonexistence. He posits a
type of filmmaking that reflects what he defines as the inherent affinities
of film: the unstaged, the fortuitous, endlessness, the indeterminate, and
 2 0 M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

the flow of life; features that reflect an understanding of cinema in tune

with the dynamics of everyday life. He makes this point more explicitly
in the final section of the book, when he observes how everyday life is
expressed in small random moments, whose texture is captured uniquely
on film: “Products of habit and microscopic interaction, they form a
resilient texture which changes slowly and survives wars, epidemics,
earthquakes and revolutions. Films tend to explore this texture of every-
day life.”22
But Kracauer is not only interesting for this affinity for a kind of
microsociology of the everyday but also for his explicit discussion of
microhistory, which he outlines in his last book, History, the Last Things
Before the Last. Published posthumously in 1969, it contains a series of
reflections on historiography that had claimed his attention in the last
years of his life. Among these were the macro- and microhistorical
approaches to the field, explored in a chapter titled “The Structure of
the Historical Universe.”23 The content of this chapter is surprising for
the intuition and detail of his ideas, which exhibit clear parallels with the
propositions of the microhistorians of the 1970s and 1980s, despite the
fact that this book went largely unnoticed when it was first published and
is not mentioned by any of those historians as an inspiration or influ-
ence. Carlo Ginzburg acknowledged this explicitly in 1993: “These post-
humous pages . . . still constitute today . . . the best introduction to micro-
history. As far as I know they have had no influence on the emergence of
this historiographical current. Certainly not on me, since I learned
about them with deplorable delay only a few years ago. But when I read
them they seemed strangely familiar.”24 Kracauer argues in his book for
the importance of microhistory not to illustrate or corroborate macro-
historical perspectives but as a focus of research in its own right that
could challenge the assertions of macrohistory. However, rather than
suggesting a dialectical approach, Kracauer proposes combining mac-
rohistory and microhistory. To this end, he posits two laws: the law of
perspective and the law of levels. According to the first, the greater the
distance I take, the more my point of view will influence what I see.
According to the second, a conclusion made at one (micro) level cannot
simply be exported to another (macro) level, as distortions will inevita-
bly occur.
 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM21

H I STORY “F ROM BELOW”: M I C R OHI STORY

Microhistory, as a specific approach within contemporary historiogra-

phy, can be located within the broader context of what has come to be
referred to as “history from below,” which began gaining currency in the
1960s. History from below questioned the traditional approaches that
studied major historical events and their protagonists, but also the quan-
titative approaches that had been in vogue during the preceding decades.
The new historiographical approaches emerging under the broad
umbrella of history from below foregrounded the everyday lives of indi-
viduals and social groups, with a perspective that opened up a dialogue
with social and cultural anthropology, disciplines that were also acquir-
ing greater importance in those years. Brewer sums it up clearly:

A large body of historical writing in the last forty years has made “every-
day life,” the experiences, actions and habits of ordinary people, a legiti-
mate object of historical enquiry. Anglophone new social history, his-
tory written in the context of the new social movements concerned with
gender, race and sexual orientation, Alltagsgeschichte in Germany,
microstoria in Italy and post-Annales cultural history in France, all
concern themselves with the lives, beliefs and practices of those who
had previously been “hidden” from history.25

As Brewer mentions here, notable among the new approaches were two
that received specific names: the German Alltagsgeschichte and the Ital-
ian microstoria. Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life, had its
principal exponent and theorist in Alf Lüdtke, responsible for a land-
mark anthology published in German and English, titled History of
Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life.26
The Italian microstoria school would have Giovanni Levi and Carlo
Ginzburg as its most prominent representatives, each with his own theo-
retical contributions, and with two landmark works that put the
approach into practice: Levi’s Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist
and Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-
Century Miller.27 Both these approaches, as Brad S. Gregory puts it, “run
parallel to each other and in certain respects overlap.”28 Although they
 2 2M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

contain certain distinguishing features, they share the same core ele-
ments, especially evident between Alltagsgeschichte and what Gregory
calls “systematic microhistory,” a term that he uses to describe the work
of Giovanni Levi.29
This book focuses on microhistory because it is the approach that has
achieved greater international prominence, both in terms of historical
practice and historiographical debates. This is evident in the abundance of
existing literature published in different countries and languages, beyond
the work of Italian microhistorians. In addition to the publications analyz-
ing specific case studies, it is worth mentioning, in the French-speaking
world, the book edited by Jacques Revel, Jeux d’echelles. La micro-analyse à
la expérience; in German, the publications of Hans Medick; in Spanish, the
contributions by Anacleto Pons and Justo Serna in Spain and by Carlos
Aguirre in Mexico; and in English, Sigurður G. Magnússon and István
Szíjártó’s book What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice.30
It is not my objective to conduct here an in-depth study of written
microhistory, but it is necessary at least to identify its main features for
the benefit of readers who may be less familiar with this approach.
Although it is identified as originating in Italy in the 1970s, because it
was there and then that the term was coined, it emerged out of an intel-
lectual hotbed of ideas with different precedents. Celso Medina, for
example, traces its origins back to Miguel de Unamuno’s concept of
intrahistoria.31 However, the British historian Edward P. Thompson, as
exponent of the new social history in the 1960s, is often identified as a
more immediate forerunner.32 Thompson is attributed with coining the
expression “history from below,” which came into widespread use from
that moment. Others often mentioned include the American anthropol-
ogist Clifford Geertz, who in 1973 introduced the term “thick descrip-
tion” to refer to a “microscopic” observation of the social reality.33 Brewer
emphasizes these connections, identifying Thompson, Geertz’s cultural
anthropology, and the microhistorians as the three responses that con-
verge to transform traditional historiography: “None of these tactics or
moves was isolated or autonomous, and they all shared, to differing degrees,
a hostility to overarching narratives and (often even more ferociously)
an antipathy to any anti-humanist position, whether structuralist—like
that of Thompson’s bête noire Althusser—or post-structuralist like that
of Derrida.”34
 M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM23

In its most restricted sense, microstoria was not really a school or a

movement, notwithstanding the fact that it was first associated with a
group of authors working in the same period (the 1970s and 1980s) in the
same country (Italy). There were important authors in other countries,
such as Natalie Z. Davis in the United States, or Emmanuel Le Roy in
France, whose book Montaillou, published in 1975, is often cited as a pre-
cursor to microhistory.35 But it is in Italy, and specifically in the journal
Quaderni storici (in the period running from the mid-1970s to the late
1980s) that we can find the most significant contributions to the estab-
lishment of what is known today as microhistory. One of the first authors
to promote this approach was Edoardo Grendi, who in the period men-
tioned would propose a historical microanalysis partly inspired by Fred-
rick Barth’s network analysis.36 Often associated with Grendi is Giovanni
Levi, as both adopted approaches closer to social history. Another trend
within Italian microstoria is related to cultural history, associated with
the work of Carlo Ginzburg, who published his well-known book The
Cheese and the Worms in 1976, although it would not be until 1979 that he
would publish a more programmatic article, co-written with Carlo
Poni.37 Despite these two different trends, Italian microstoria can be
understood as a distinctive historiographical approach, visible in the
work of the aforementioned authors in Quaderni storici (whose editorial
board as of 1978 included Grendi, Levi, Ginzburg, and Poni), and in the
“Microstorie” book series by the publisher Einaudi, edited by Levi and
Ginzburg from 1981 to 1991. The end of the book series and the differ-
ences between these historians has prompted some authors to ask
whether microhistory was a fleeting phenomenon or whether it is still
relevant today, a question Peter Burke raises in the second edition to New
Perspectives on Historical Writing, published in 2001.38 Notwithstanding
this debate, microhistory continues to play a role in both historiographi-
cal discussions and historical practice; evidence of this can be found in
the creation of a new book series by Routledge in 2018 under the name of
“Microhistories.”
Having established this historical contextualization, what follows is
an outline of the main features of microhistorical theory and practice,
which will serve as interpretative parameters for the purpose of defining
microhistorical documentaries.39 My intention here is not to delve into
the particularities and distinctions of different microhistorical studies
 24 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

but to provide an account of the elements that such studies share. To this
end, my authors of reference will be Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg,
as they have been the two most internationally recognized authors in the
field, not only for the two books mentioned above, but also for their vari-
ous theoretical and methodological contributions, many of which have
been translated and published in English and Spanish.
The change in the scale of observation is without doubt the most char-
acteristic feature of microhistory. In contrast to historical studies tradi-
tionally focused on the macro level, microhistorical research proposes a
reduction of scale for the purpose of developing a different understand-
ing of the object of study. As Revel explains, “varying the focal length of
the lens is not simply about enlarging (or shrinking) the size of the object
caught in the viewfinder, but about altering its form and structure . . .
about transforming the content of what is being represented (in other
words, the decision about what is actually representable).” 40 Paul Ricoeur
also offers an insightful observation on this question when he stresses
that this change of scale produces “different concatenations of configu-
ration and causality.” 41 The objective here is not to offer particular case
studies as “examples” of general theories, but to discover, through a
“microscopic” analysis, historical realities that have gone unnoticed in
macrohistorical analysis, in order to better explain a particular era.
This objective inevitably brings up one of the most common questions
raised in relation to microhistory: its representativeness. For example, in
the case analyzed by Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms, the aim is
to determine the extent to which a detailed study of the life of a miller
persecuted by the Roman Inquisition can contribute to a better under-
standing of the popular culture of the sixteenth century. Herein lies the
main challenge of microhistory: to propose an alternative pathway to
historical knowledge based on the microanalysis of personal and social
relations. When writing microhistory, these authors seek to ensure that
their analysis will make a significant contribution to our understanding
of more general contexts of the society and culture to which their case
study belongs. They thus try to avoid what would be mere casuistry (or
“incidental analysis,” to use Darnton’s expression), a tendency that Ist-
ván Szíjártó associates more with some microhistorical practices in the
United States.42 Indeed, it is Szíjártó himself who, to explain the relation-
ship between scales, suggests the analogous application of the concept of
 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM25

the “fractal,” which in geometry refers to an object whose basic structure

is the same at different scales. The microhistorical case would thus be
understood as a fractal whose structure is discovered by historians in
their painstaking microhistorical study of an era and which reflects his-
torical issues of a wider scope.43 This question is also related to Levi’s
insistence on distinguishing microhistory from local history, to high-
light the fact that “the problem of microhistory is always a problem of
generalizations.” 44 Levi makes this point in relation to his study of the
people of Santena in his book Inheriting Power: “I tried to see whether
certain things, and particularly the land market, for example, studied at
the local level, at the micro level, studied with the microscope, might tell
us more, might reveal to us the mechanisms that on a larger scale we
could never be able to see.” 45 Levi stresses the point that he has not writ-
ten the history of Santena, as for him it is not of particular interest. And
citing Geertz’s famous dictum that “anthropologists study in villages,
they don’t study villages,” Levi concludes that he has written a history in
those villages, not about those villages.46
Closely linked to the vindication of the micro scale is the centrality of
human agency, the consideration of the individual as the main historical
subject, freely engaging in social relationships, in contrast to more deter-
minist approaches associated with structuralism or quantitative history.
Ginzburg and Poni point this out explicitly in their article “The Name
and the Game,” where they argue for a prosopography from below, a his-
tory focusing on “the proper name” (i.e., a specific individual) as a guid-
ing thread for archival research, which would be associated with a study
of the subaltern strata of society.47 Levi stresses this aspect when he
rejects the distortions created by quantitative formalization, which
“accentuate in a functionalist way the role of systems of rules and mech-
anistic processes of social change,” while ignoring the freedom of action
of individual people.48 By focusing on such individuals, Levi goes on to
suggest, microhistory reflects the inconsistencies of normative systems
and consequently “the fragmentation, contradictions, and plurality of
viewpoints which make all systems fluid and open.” 49
A microhistorical approach also requires an intensive study of avail-
able archives, which are not always sufficiently comprehensive, as the
issues chosen for study are not the kind of matters that are systematically
registered in public archives. However, the lacunae and missing data can
 2 6 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

sometimes be as eloquent as the documented information. It then

becomes necessary to employ conjecture as a method, based on the “evi-
dential paradigm” proposed by Ginzburg in an article in 1979.50 In this
article, Ginzburg compares the historian to a doctor or detective (in the
style of Sherlock Holmes) who works with signs or symptoms in order to
draw some conclusions. This can give rise to more unorthodox historio-
graphical approaches, as Ginzburg argues with reference to the work of
Natalie Z. Davis in The Return of Martin Guerre. The Italian historian
applauds his American colleague’s combination of erudition and imagi-
nation, proof and possibility, leading her “to work around the lacunae
with archival materials contiguous in space and time to that which has
been lost or never materialized.”51
Microhistorians also advocate the use of narrative structures in writ-
ing history, once again in contrast to the strategies used in quantitative
and longue dureé histories. This idea is consistent with the frequent
choice to focus their research on an individual or family, whose history is
most appropriately expressed in narrative form.52 They also often admit
the possibility of including the historian’s voice in the narrative itself, in
what could be described as a metadiscursive strategy, a technique rarely
found in older historiographical approaches. Such a strategy is often a
response to the need to make the conjectural approach to the sources
explicit to the reader, highlighting their fragmentary nature and expos-
ing the way the gaps found in the research are interpreted.
These features have led some to associate microhistorians with post-
modern approaches. Their vindication of narrative structures for histori-
cal writing, their understanding of archives as fragmentary, and their
inclusion of metadiscursive strategies are aspects that could be under-
stood as postmodern, in that they foreground the constructed nature of
historical studies, in clear contrast to traditional historiographical
approaches and the claims to “total history” of quantitative or serial
approaches. This raises a complex question of great relevance to contem-
porary historiography whose in-depth exploration is beyond the scope of
this chapter. In the specific case studied here, both Levi and Ginzburg
have dismissed the postmodern label, explicitly stating their rejection of
the skeptical or relativist positions often associated with such an
approach.53 Ginzburg is undoubtedly the one who has addressed this
question the most directly, in his critique of the theories of Hayden
 M I C RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM27

White. In opposition to a radical constructivist understanding of his-

tory, the Italian historian asserts the cognitive dimension of the historio-
graphical enterprise as a legitimate means of gaining access to past reali-
ties. However, as Serna and Pons explain in their detailed analysis of this
question, the fact that Ginzburg rejects the understanding of history as
rhetoric does not mean that he is unaware “that documents are represen-
tations and that, for that very reason, the external, what has occurred,
what has disappeared, is by its nature irretrievable, but it is not unknow-
able, because those vestiges, even a single vestige, will enable us . . . to
allude to that extratextual world, to that presence that the skeptics would
deny.”54

M I C RO H ISTORY AND THE DOCUMEN TA RY FI LM

Having set out the parameters that represent the broadest consensus on
the definition of microhistory, the next step is to study how those param-
eters are reflected in a particular type of documentary that I have defined
here as microhistorical. No specific analysis has actually been made in
historiography of the relationship between microhistory and documen-
tary film, although it has been explored briefly in relation to the film
medium or to fiction films by scholars such as Kracauer, Revel, Davis,
Slávik, and Brewer. In his pioneering study of microhistory discussed
above in this chapter, Siegfried Kracauer actually mentions Pudovkin
and Griffith in an interesting comparison between film and history.
Moreover, he posits a combination of macro- and microhistorical scales
of observation in the same way that film combines the wide shot and the
close-up: “The big must be looked at from different distances to be under-
stood; its analysis and interpretation involve a constant movement
between the levels of generality. . . . The macro historian will falsify his
subject unless he inserts the close-ups gained by the micro studies.”55
Some of the best-known microhistorians, such as Revel or Davis, have
also made some brief but interesting comparisons between film and
microhistory. In Jeux d’echelles, Revel considers the importance of the
change of scale to gain access to new knowledge in relation to Michelan-
gelo Antonioni’s film Blow-up (1966), whose protagonist unexpectedly
 2 8M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

discovers what seems to be a murder plot when he enlarges some photos

he has taken of a couple.56 Davis, on the other hand, refers briefly in her
book Slaves on Screen to the possibility that fiction film portrays the past
in a microhistorical way: “In their microhistories, films can reveal social
structures and social codes in a given time and place, sources and forms
of alliance and conflict, and the tension between the traditional and the
new.”57 However, she does not explore this question or apply it to the
analysis of the films she studies in her book.
Among the more recent studies of microhistory, the contributions of
Andrej Slávik and of the aforementioned John Brewer are worthy of spe-
cial note. Slávik acknowledges previous contributions, like those of Revel
and even Brewer, to go on to make the somewhat controversial proposi-
tion that the essay films of Chris Marker are the best equivalent of Ginz-
burg’s microhistory in the field of cinema.58 Brewer, on the other hand,
identifies neorealism as a clear precursor to Italian microhistory, from
which it would take its humanist realism and its rejection of skepticism:
“They take their views first and foremost from the Italian neo-realist
movement of the immediate post-Second World War era, and more gen-
erally from twentieth-century notions of realism derived from literature
and film.”59 Brewer asserts that Roberto Rossellini’s film Paisá (1946)
could be considered the first work of Italian microhistory, as it explores
the story of Italian liberation during World War II through six episodes
set in different regions of the country: “The stories reduce the conflict to
a human scale, yet in doing so they undercut or rewrite the positive story
of liberation, showing how time’s arrow is often diverted. . . . Through-
out there is a tension between veracity and verisimilitude, between the
patterns of everyday life and the forces of a larger history.” 60 This per-
spective is of special interest because Ginzburg himself made reference
to it in an interview he gave in 2014, when he remarked that neorealism
constituted a foundational experience for him, particularly the film
Umberto D. (1952).61
The absence of explicit references by historians to the relationship
between microhistory and documentary film is perhaps understandable
given that documentaries have not traditionally formed part of a shared
cultural background like literature or fiction films.62 Nevertheless, there
is no doubt that when studying documentary film, some very interesting
parallels with microhistory emerge. At first glance, a possible connection
 M I C RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM29

suggests itself between microhistory’s interest in history “from below”

and the abundant production of documentaries about individuals who
are not public historical figures. The list of such films is endless, ranging
from the foundational documentary Nanook of the North (1927) to more
contemporary works like To Be and to Have (Etre et avoir, 2002), about a
small school in rural France. However, it seems more reasonable to asso-
ciate this documentary trend with anthropology or ethnography rather
than with history, as the subjects these documentaries explore are set in
the present day of the filmmaker and they rarely include any kind of
reflection that could be defined as historiographical, in which the past is
featured as an object of analysis. Instead, they would be what are gener-
ally referred to as ethnographic documentaries or observational docu-
mentaries, two categories which, although not synonymous, share ele-
ments in common.
It would be equally inappropriate to posit an association between
microhistorical approaches and the kind of historical television docu-
mentaries popularized by theme channels like History (formerly History
Channel). Without dismissing such a connection outright, it seems
rather tenuous, as such documentaries are generally conceived as vehi-
cles for disseminating history, usually understood in the macrohistorical
sense, focusing either on past eras or on major historical figures. Because
of their informative character, they generally fall into what Bill Nichols
has defined as the “expository documentary,” with features quite distinct
from microhistorical approaches.63 As Nichols explains, expository doc-
umentaries offer an argument about the world, giving the impression of
objectivity and of well-substantiated judgments. Their dominant textual
mode is the argumentation of an omniscient commentator/narrator,
supported by contemporary or archival images, and by testimonies of
experts or witnesses.
In contrast to these categories, which have a long tradition in docu-
mentary practice, in the 1970s and 1980s new approaches began to appear
in nonfiction film that exhibit clearer similarities to microhistorical his-
toriography, reinforced by the fact that their emergence coincided with
the dissemination of microhistory itself. The films adopting these new
approaches began to question the characteristic omniscience of the tra-
ditional expository documentary and often included the research pro-
cess itself as part of the film, thereby also bringing the filmmaker in front
 3 0 M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

of the camera and breaking the objectivist paradigm popularly associ-

ated with documentary film. They also incorporated autobiographical
perspectives, in which memory—personal or collective—was a central
focus, and they made use of hybrid formats in which the boundaries
between fiction and nonfiction, between narrative and essayistic struc-
tures, were not always clearly delimited. And they explored new uses of
archival footage, with approaches that were more conscious not only of
the problems such footage posed but also of its potential, with appropria-
tion strategies that in some cases resembled those used in experimental
films.
This creative hotbed has provided the milieu for the emergence of a
type of documentary dealing with historical issues that I have termed
“microhistorical documentary.” Within the flexibility required of any
attempt to delimit the boundaries of a creative practice, its specific char-
acter places it precisely in between the ethnographic or observational
documentary and the expository/informational documentary with a his-
torical subject. As noted in the introduction, it is important to remember
that qualifying these documentaries as microhistorical implies positing
an analogous rather than a literal translation of the practices of profes-
sional written history to documentary filmmaking. Each field is gov-
erned by its own strategies and approaches, related to both the obvious
differences between written and audiovisual language and the different
research strategies employed in each field. As is the case in most histori-
cal research, microhistorians base their work on an intensive analysis of
the sources they find in archives, and, as they often explore eras prior to
the twentieth century, they work largely with written documents. On the
other hand, although they also conduct intensive research, filmmakers
rely heavily on audiovisual sources and work with them with a more cre-
ative approach, in which formal and/or aesthetic questions may be as
important as strictly historiographical issues. As was also mentioned in
the introduction and is equally true of written microhistories, it is
important to note that the documentaries studied in this book exhibit
differing degrees of affinity with the most typical features of microhis-
tory, ranging from films whose microhistorical qualities are more para-
digmatic, such as The Maelstrom, to others whose relationship is looser,
such as History and Memory or Lost, Lost, Lost.
 M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM31

With the foregoing qualifications in mind, it can be asserted that what

is referred to here as microhistorical documentary fits within the general
parameters of microhistory, as it is usually understood and practiced in
contemporary historiography. First of all, these documentaries are char-
acterized by a reduced scale of observation, focusing on specific individ-
uals, families, or social groups, generally of an ordinary or marginal
nature, far removed from the big figures and events of public history.
However, the objective behind this reduced scale is not to conduct a
strictly ethnographic or observational study located in the present of the
filmmaker, but to explore the past and to place the “micro” analysis in
relation to relevant macrohistorical contexts, thereby making these doc-
umentaries historiographically representative in their own right. This is
an essential feature of the microhistorical documentary, as it is of micro-
history in its differentiation from social and cultural anthropology. In
some cases, this representativeness will be quite clear, as it is in The
Maelstrom or The Missing Picture. In other cases, it may not be so obvi-
ously foregrounded, but it will emerge through the historiographical
tension between the micro- and macrohistorical dimensions that is an
indispensable requirement for a documentary to be considered micro-
historical. In parallel with its reduced scale of observation and its his-
torical representativeness, these documentaries also prioritize human
agency, that is, the analysis of the free action of the protagonists, as a
means of understanding more general historical contexts. This feature is
particularly accentuated when the films are autobiographical in nature—a
point that I return to below.
Microhistorical documentaries and written microhistory also both
involve a thorough study of available archives, although documentaries
rely especially on audio/visual documents often taken from family
archives: home movies, snapshots, and (less commonly) sound record-
ings. Such sources tend to be rare, especially home movies, which were
costly to produce until the popularization of video in the 1980s, and
which have also been affected by a lack of concern for their preservation
until recently. As is analyzed in detail in chapter 2, filmmakers are thus
faced with a task of reconstruction that in some cases is similar to that
performed by microhistorians who experience a lack of documents
related to their objects of study in institutional archives. Thus Ginzburg’s
 3 2M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

evidential paradigm and its conjectural approach also become impor-

tant here, because of the need to fill in lacunae and silences, to infer the
stories behind the celebratory nature of snapshots and home movies, and
to complement these sources with other documentation that can convey
their full complexity.
In this task of reconstruction of the past, these documentaries gener-
ally employ flexible and innovative narrative strategies. In contrast to the
omniscient argumentation of the expository documentary, they offer
perspectives that are more limited in terms of their cognitive ambition,
due not only to the reduced scale of the object of study, but also to the
position of the filmmaker/narrator or the delegated narrators. There is
frequent use of structures that combine narrative elements with other
more essayistic features, where the filmmaker’s voice, either explicitly or
conveyed through formal strategies, permeates the discourse more obvi-
ously, as can be seen in the films of Rithy Panh, Lise Yasui, or Michal
Aviad. In this way, these documentaries reflect Giovanni Levi’s sugges-
tion that microhistory should incorporate “into the main body of the
narrative the procedures of research itself, the documentary limitations,
techniques of persuasion and interpretative constructions,” so that “the
researcher’s point of view becomes an intrinsic part of the account.” 64 It
would be fair to say that these self-reflexive strategies have been inte-
grated into documentary cinema more naturally than into written his-
tory, often openly interrogating the different layers of the past preserved
in archives or in the memory of their protagonists, underscoring the
constructed nature of the work.
These documentaries also add an affective dimension to their micro-
historical exploration that distances them from written history. The film
medium offers a range of strategies that underscore this affective dimen-
sion, from the sensation of the present moment generated by the audiovi-
sual recording to others like the use of extradiegetic music or, in the case
of autobiographical narratives, the filmmaker’s voice-over narration.
The end result generally contains an unquestionably powerful emo-
tional/affective charge that can bring into play more complex spectator
reactions than those elicited by conventional historical narratives, facili-
tating a stronger level of identification with the stories told. Moreover, it
is not unusual for these documentaries to contain a clearly performative
dimension that directly appeals to and seeks to engage the spectator.
 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM33

This is not really so different an approach from that used by microhisto-

rians, who sometimes seek an explicit dialogue with the reader, but the
film medium offers tools that can result in a higher level of involvement.
The affective engagement of the microhistorical documentary is also
enhanced by the frequent inclusion of testimonies by protagonists and
witnesses. This is a direction that microhistorians do not generally take,
as their work often relates to eras for which only written sources survive;
however, it does connect to another related historiographical approach:
oral history. Although microhistorians and oral historians are situated
in the same context of social history and are often inspired by an interest
in “history from below,” there is actually very little dialogue between
them. There is also a similar dearth of studies linking oral history and
documentary film, with exceptions such as the studies by Michel Frisch
or Dan Sipe (who cites Lise Yasui’s documentary A Family Gathering).65
But, as can be seen from the cases analyzed in this book, personal testi-
monies are a key element in most microhistorical documentaries,
whether they appear in the form of interviews with the protagonists or
through the filmmaker’s own autobiographical commentary. Sometimes
these interviews form part of the research process but do not end up
appearing in the documentary, as is the case in some of Péter Forgács’s
best-known works. But in most cases, such interviews form an explicit
part of the microhistorical narration of the past, as one of the threads
used by the filmmakers/historians in their research. Interviewing can
even become the dominant research strategy, resulting in a documentary
so close to oral history that we might question whether it really should be
classified as microhistorical, partly due to its lack of use of archival
research. This can be found, almost to the point of being a trend, in cer-
tain documentary films from Argentina that review recent history in a
tone that could be described as in tune with a microhistorical sensibility:
from the immigration stories documented in Hacer patria (David Blaus-
tein, 2007) and Carta a un padre (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 2013) to the sto-
ries of the victims of forced disappearances during the last dictatorship
(1976–1983), such as the pioneering film Juan, como si nada hubiera suce-
dido (Carlos Echeverría, 1987) and Nicolás Prividera’s M (2007).66
In view of these structural and formal features, it is worth asking the
question—raised previously in relation to the Italian microhistorians—
of whether the epistemological approaches of these microhistorical
 3 4 M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

documentaries might be described as leaning toward a postmodernist

stance. Robert Rosenstone seems to view it this way when he suggests
that the most genuinely postmodern historiography is not being done by
historians, but by filmmakers, identifying as a paradigmatic example a
film that will be analyzed in chapter 4 of this book: History and Mem-
ory.67 However, the postmodern dimension that Rosenstone identifies in
these films does not seem to be related to an epistemological skepticism
in the Derridian tradition. This can be deduced from the features he
points out as postmodern, which range from their capacity “to tell the
past self-reflexively” and “make sense of them [past events] in a partial
and open-ended, rather than totalized manner” to their way of remind-
ing us “that the present is the site of all past representation and know-
ing.” 68 It is worth questioning the extent to which microhistorians would
be comfortable with all the features that Rosenstone describes as charac-
teristic of a postmodern history. But it seems reasonable to assume in
any case that microhistorical documentaries fit neatly within the param-
eters proposed by Ginzburg or Levi for an exploration of new historio-
graphical pathways, without this meaning that they have adopted the
epistemological skepticism associated with a certain kind of postmodern
sensibility. It seems obvious that filmmakers like Péter Forgács or Rob-
ert A. Nakamura view their work not as something epistemologically
opaque but as a way of understanding painful historical processes
through microhistorical perspectives. Some microhistorical documenta-
ries of an autobiographical nature, where personal memory plays a more
central role in the reconstruction of the past, might be more ambiguous
in this respect. But this has more to do with the complex relationships
between memory, history, and autobiography, discussed below.

M EM O RY, AUTOBIOGRA PHY, A N D MI C R OHI STORY

The autobiographical perspective presented in different microhistorical

documentaries constitutes an approach generally absent from profes-
sional written history. While it is true that over the last century a tradi-
tion of historians’ autobiographies has been consolidated, these often
tend to focus more on the professional dimension of the authors as
 MICROHISTORY AND DOCUMENTARY FILM35

historians, as Jeremy D. Popkin maintains in History, Historians, and

Autobiography.69 In his book Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’
Autobiographies, Jaume Aurell questions the adoption of an excessively
uniform view of this tradition, and proposes an interesting taxonomy
that would evolve in line with historiographical trends: from the more
humanistic and typically biographical perspectives of the interwar
period, to forms closer to the monograph (and ego-histoires in France) in
the postwar period, and finally to postmodern and interventionist forms
in more recent years.70 But in any case, the content of these works gener-
ally turns more on autobiographical/historiographical questions than on
the study of periods of recent history based on the author’s own personal
experience. In the documentary field, however, it is relatively common to
find films of a microhistorical nature presented explicitly from autobio-
graphical perspectives. This is not a general trend in autobiographical
documentaries, which often take approaches without a historiographical
perspective, related more to personal introspection, questions of identity,
or sociological concerns; nevertheless, it is a very productive variant for
the kinds of microhistorical explorations found in documentary films.
When a microhistorical documentary takes an autobiographical per-
spective, the interwoven nature of personal memory and public history
is placed in the foreground, which in turn points to the complex issue of
the relationship between memory and history. A good starting point for
considering this relationship could be Paul Ricoeur’s assertion that
memory is the matrix of history.71 Memory is personal, but it develops in
and feeds on the social or collective dimension. Memory began as oral
and therefore generational, associated with lived experience, and it
broadened with the introduction of writing—that pharmakon that has
inspired so much debate from Plato down to Derrida—to become writ-
ten memory. History feeds off this memory that recalls the past, but in its
most common interpretation it is understood as the study and analysis of
the traces of the past, applying methods that aim to produce a reliable
representation of that past. It is beyond the scope of this book to explore
the questions raised by this basic distinction, which Julio Arostegui
sums up as the “relationship between memory as a permanent represen-
tation of experience in the individual mind and in human collectives
and history as rationalization and objectification temporalized and
expounded in a discourse, so to speak, on that experience.”72 Assuming
 3 6 M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

this distinction, we must then ask how it is reflected in microhistorical

documentaries with an autobiographical perspective. It is worth clarify-
ing here that the autobiographical should not be automatically equated
with the microhistorical, as if the macrohistorical belonged to the public
and the microhistorical to the private, which would also include the
autobiographical. Such a conclusion would be erroneous not only because
there are autobiographical approaches with no historiographical inten-
tion, but also because, as various microhistorians have stressed, it is not
merely the scope of the study that matters, but the historical knowledge
gleaned from applying the “microscope” to the object of study. Having
clarified this point, it seems reasonable to assert that in microhistorical
documentaries the autobiographical perspective makes personal mem-
ory the foundation of the historiographical enterprise, establishing a
specific link between lived memory and public history, understanding
the latter particularly in its dimension as history of the present.
The starting point is therefore to be found in personal memory in its
strictest sense—as a recollection of a lived experience—and in its expres-
sion on screen.73 The representation of that memory poses specific chal-
lenges that the best autobiographical films manage to tackle successfully.
First of all, they articulate the discourse around the “I” of the filmmaker
who remembers, through his or her presence as an autodiegetic narrator
and also through his or her physical participation. These films also effec-
tively capture the temporality associated with the mnemonic act, which
does not generally involve establishing a strictly physical distinction of
time but entails presenting it as a constant flow in which past and present
are dynamically intertwined, in the manner of the Greek concept of kai-
ros. The past remembered from this perspective is contemplated and
interpreted from the present, constructing the kind of complex structure
characteristic of Gilles Deleuze’s crystal-images.74 In this sense, the past
is not frozen in a time that no longer exists, but continues being affected
by the present, as it is somehow recreated when it is invoked, influenced
by present knowledge and emotions that vest it with new dimensions.
The exploration of personal memory in the autobiographical docu-
mentary also entails its transfer into the public sphere, its conversion
into a shared discourse. This explicitly brings into play another of the
core issues in the contemporary understanding of memory: the interwo-
ven nature of the personal and social dimensions, of personal memory
 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU M E NTA RY FI LM37

and social or collective memory. As Geoffrey Cubitt explains, our mne-

monic experience “may depend precisely on our ability to articulate what
we remember within the linguistic and cultural structures that we share
with others, and to negotiate its meanings through social exchanges.”75 It
is individuals who remember, but as social beings their memories are
influenced by the social and cultural contexts in which they take part;
and those memories are in turn shared socially, constructing a collective
understanding of memory.76 This can be observed in autobiographical
documentaries, as narratives of identity that filmmakers construct in
interaction with their familial and social contexts, and as films that
become shared public discourse, contributing to the construction of col-
lective memory.
In this social dimension of autobiographical experience, it is clear that
the family constitutes the first and most fundamental context of social-
ization. This acquires special significance in autobiographical documen-
taries, as is shown in the cases analyzed in this book. It is also reflected
in Jim Lane’s proposition of the “family portrait” as one of the basic cat-
egories of the American autobiographical documentary.77 Along the
same lines, Alisa Lebow explains that first-person documentaries gener-
ally invoke a first-person plural: “Autobiographical film implicates oth-
ers in its quest to represent a self, implicitly constructing a subject always
already in-relation—that is, in the first person plural.”78 It is interesting
to note how both Lane and Lebow place the exploration of these family
networks in relation to their social and historical contexts, suggesting
(without explicitly stating it) a potential microhistorical dimension. In
this sense, Lebow suggests that “one encounters a lively, interactive, com-
municative process with history in these films.”79 And Lane observes
that “these family portraits often stand in a tension with an official past
that may often be contested in various stories told by individuals.”80
Juliette Goursat is even more explicit in making this connection, as the
title of one of the chapters in her book on autobiographical documen-
tary, “Je(ux) d’echelles. Le devenir collectif sous l’angle de l’histoire per-
sonelle,” creates a play on words out of the title of the book edited by
Jacques Revel on microhistory, Jeux d’echelles.81 Goursat highlights the
journey from the “I” to the “we” articulated in a series of autobiographi-
cal documentaries with a historical approach, including some of the
films studied in this book, like Perlov’s and Mekas’s, although she studies
 3 8 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O C U MEN TA RY FI LM

this question much more specifically in relation to Chilean documenta-

ries on the Pinochet dictatorship.82
The interaction between personal and social memory also involves
specific approaches to the use of archival sources, which in autobio-
graphical documentaries often relies on audio/visual family archives, as
are analyzed in more depth in chapter 2. The snapshots and home mov-
ies of the family archive are mnemonic objects par excellence, memory
supplements as powerful as or even more powerful than writing. This
has led authors such as José Van Dijck to affirm that in contemporary
culture, memory cannot be separated from its mediated representation,
as we increasingly remember through these media. Van Dijck thus pro-
poses the concept of “mediated memory,” with which she seeks to nego-
tiate “the relationship of self and culture at large, between what counts as
private and what as public, and how individuality relates to collectiv-
ity.”83 Indeed, family archives constitute a primary context where the
filmmaker’s mnemonic work moves beyond the individual “I” into the
more immediate social milieu. Moreover, these archives are often related
to other activities, like trips, vacations, or public events that explicitly
reflect wider social environments within which that mediated memory
exists.
It is also worth stressing the importance of family archives for inter-
generational memory transmission. Personal memory, as memory of
lived experience, covers the biographical arc of each individual, but it
expands insofar as we are all receivers of a memory transmitted from
one generation to the next. In the last century, snapshots and home mov-
ies were added to oral and written transmission, becoming powerful
mnemonic anchors in the transmission of memory, as has been explored
by scholars like Marianne Hirsch, with her concept of postmemory.84
Hirsch applies this concept to memories marked by historical traumas
suffered by the previous generation, in whose transmission family pho-
tographs play a key role. These are memories not experienced personally
by the next generation but that still have a strong impact on them. Simi-
lar effects are explored in autobiographical documentaries studied in
this book, such as History and Memory, A Family Gathering, and The
Missing Picture.
Given their autobiographical character and the time span they cover,
these films also fit into the category of “history of the present.”85 This
 MICROHISTORY AND DOCUMENTARY FILM39

concept, which has been championed by a number of prominent authors,

particularly European historians, constitutes something of an oxymo-
ron, given that history is by definition a discipline concerned with study-
ing the past. Here, however, it proves especially useful for studying how
the memory of lived experience turns into history, a phenomenon that is
very much a part of contemporary societies, as Julio Arostegui suggests,
where “the aging of memory is rejected and therefore it is historicized,
because memory made history is much more permanent.”86 While it is
true that any autobiographical project is developed on the basis of a ret-
rospective narrative that aims to reconstruct the personal past and give it
meaning, in the case of microhistorical documentaries of an autobio-
graphical nature this retrospective view is explicitly interwoven with the
sociocultural contexts that frame it, giving it a historiographical dimension
that goes beyond the strictly personal/familiar. Although these documen-
taries seem to lack the temporal distance expected of the historian, this
is precisely where the challenge lies for historians of the present, who, as
Henry Rousso explains, “act ‘as if ’ they could seize hold of time as it
passes . . . slow down the process of time’s retreat and the oblivion that
lies in wait for any human experience,” thereby giving the present “a sub-
stantiality, a perspective, a time frame, as all historians engaged in peri-
odization do.”87 Once again, the dialogue between historians and film-
makers is both complex and rewarding here, as the very nature of cinematic
time emphasizes this “presentness.” In this sense, Rousso’s “seizing hold
of time as it passes,” which seems to paraphrase André Bazin’s idea of
photography and film as media that embalm time and rescue it from its
corruption, takes on a special meaning in these documentaries.88 Never-
theless, it is a present that will turn into history when it is subjected to
autobiographical retrospection, which in the film medium occurs in the
editing phase, explicitly underscored by the autodiegetic narration that
verbalizes this retrospective process.
This chapter has offered an exploration of the contexts and general
features of microhistorical documentaries, showing how these films fall
within the basic parameters of microhistorical practice, with a reduced
scale of observation of the past that sheds light on macrohistorical con-
texts, a central role given to human agency, a conjectural approach to
archival research, and a reliance on narrative structures. Films of this
kind therefore differ markedly from the informational/expository model
 4 0 M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CU MEN TA RY FI LM

of the historical television documentary, but also from ethnographic or

observational approaches. Microhistorical documentaries can be distin-
guished from these approaches largely because of their historiographical
purpose, pursued using the tools specific to the film medium, with an
analogous, nonliteral adoption of the methods specific to professional
written microhistory, which in no way undermines their value as a mode
of historical knowledge.
 2
THE ARCHIVE IN THE
MICROHISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY

F
ollowing the theoretical framework presented in chapter 1, this
chapter looks more specifically at the use of archival sources in
microhistorical documentaries. This issue is considered first in
the broader context of archival appropriation in documentary films, fol-
lowed by a more detailed analysis of family archives, which are the most
important source for microhistorical documentaries, with special atten-
tion to home movies.
As a general principle, it could be asserted that documentary film-
makers use archives as a source of information in a manner analogous to
the way professional historians do. However, from the outset it is worth
highlighting a few aspects unique to documentaries. The first is obvious:
as it is an audiovisual medium, although filmmakers may make use of
written documents and oral records, they accord special importance to
photographic and film records. Second, these archival documents are
not merely sources of information but are also included in the film
through various appropriation strategies, ranging from expository
modes to other more experimental approaches. And third, as these doc-
umentaries often deal with relatively recent events, as part of a history of
the present, they frequently make use of the testimony of witnesses (or of
the filmmaker, in autobiographical narratives) to complement or contex-
tualize the archives.
 4 2  T H E ARC H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

ARCHIVAL APPROPRIAT I ON I N
DOCUMENTARY FILMS

As an emerging practice of the last few decades, microhistorical docu-

mentaries generally approach archives from a perspective that has incor-
porated the “archival turn” experienced in contemporary historiogra-
phy. There is no single consensus on the meaning of this term, but it is
perhaps best summed up in Ann Laura Stoler’s definition of it as a “move
from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject” that has resulted in “a
rethinking of the materiality and imaginary of collections and what
kinds of truth claims lie in documentation.”1 The archival turn has pro-
voked a reconsideration of the role of the archive as an institution and its
relationships with power structures (the focus of some of Foucault’s and
Derrida’s well-known theories on the subject), as well as the value of
archival documents as historical evidence. This reconsideration has led
to a shift away from a static view of the archive to one that considers, as
Vicente Sánchez-Biosca suggests, that “an archive is not a neutral reposi-
tory of material” but “a site of knowledge production.”2 This is a question
that has been given increasing attention in archival studies, and which
Terry Cook insightfully sums up as follows: “The archive is now seen
increasingly as the site where social memory has been (and is) con-
structed. . . . The record thus becomes a cultural signifier, a mediated
and ever-changing construction, not some empty template into which
acts and facts are poured.”3 As Marlene Madoff suggests, this has led to a
rejection of the fetishization of the archive as a transparent means of
access to the past: “Many scholars . . . have come to understand the his-
torical record . . . not as an objective representation of the past, but rather
as a selection of objects that have been preserved for a variety of rea-
sons. . . . Whatever the archive contains is already a reconstruction—a
recording of history from a particular perspective.” 4
As Cook himself asserts, this does not mean that “everything is adrift
in a sea of meaningless relativism,”5 but that the meaning of archival
documents must also be established based on the context of their cre-
ation and the subsequent mediations of archival processes. On this point,
it is pertinent to consider the arguments of George Didi-Huberman in
his book Images in Spite of All, where he stresses the value of photo-
graphic archives for gaining knowledge of the Holocaust. With this
 T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY43

assertion, he initiated an open debate with the filmmaker Claude Lan-

zmann, who, in his famous documentary Shoah and in statements made
subsequently, rejected archives in favor of testimony, on the basis that
the Holocaust itself was unrepresentable. Following the work of thinkers
such as Foucault and Michel de Certeau, Didi-Huberman acknowledges
that “an archive is in no way the immediate reflection of the real, but is a
writing endowed with syntax . . . and with ideology” and that “the source
is never a ‘pure’ point of origin, but an already stratified time, already
complex.” 6 However, he goes on, this should not lead us to reject the
truth of archival documents, and here he cites Carlo Ginzburg, with an
argument similar to one already outlined in chapter 1: “Between the
excess of positivism and the excesses of skepticism, one must, according
to Ginzburg, constantly relearn . . . to see in sources ‘neither open win-
dows, as the positivists think, nor walls obstructing sight, as the skeptics
claim.’ ”7
This theoretical framework has been expanded and enriched by con-
tributions from other disciplines in relation to archives, in a new mani-
festation of the archival turn that has opened this field, traditionally the
preserve of professional archivists and historians, to other perspectives.
As Jeannette Bastian explains, this turn has meant that the “ ‘archive’
expanded beyond the text to include memory, witnessing, materiality,
performance, art.”8 According to her, “this expansive view of the archive
helped construct a conceptual and analytical terrain for discourse in a
range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences,”9 includ-
ing art, photography, film, literature, anthropology, rhetoric, and the
performing arts. This growing interdisciplinary interest in the archive
has specific implications for artistic practices, as has been explored by
authors such as Ruth Rosengarten, Anna M. Guasch, and Charles
Merewether.10 For the purposes of this book, the role played here by pho-
tography and cinema is of special interest, as they work with the archival
materials to expand their meaning, establishing fruitful dialogues
between the audio/visual document and different aesthetic, narrative,
historical, anthropological, and rhetorical perspectives.
In documentary film, the archival appropriation has a specificity of its
own, as the filmmaker is working with archival footage whose indexical
link to the present of its filming vests it with a strong truth value for the
spectator. But this material is open to interpretation, incorporating new
 4 4  T H E ARCH IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

meanings when it is inserted into the narrative or argumentative struc-

ture of the documentary. Philip Rosen comments on this question when
he points out that documentary “involves a synthesizing knowledge
claim, by virtue of a sequence that sublates an undoubtable referential
field of pastness into meaning. Documentary as it comes to us from this
tradition is not just post facto, but historical in the modern sense.”11 For
this construction of meaning, the documentary filmmaker brings the
archival footage into dialogue with other expressive tools, ranging from
the voice-over narrator to the testimonies of witnesses or experts, the use
of extradiegetic music, or ad hoc filming of places and objects. With
these and other elements, the filmmaker articulates a structure intended
to reconstruct the past, but that transcends the mere transmission of
knowledge to include dimensions not normally associated with conven-
tional historiography, like the affective, the essayistic, or the experi-
mental. In this way, documentaries take distinctively historiographical
approaches, as Catherine Russell points out in her book Archiveology,
when she suggests that “film and media artists are uniquely positioned
to find and use these tools to produce critical histories and trigger his-
torical awakenings.”12
Microhistorical documentaries do not make use of the archive in a
way necessarily very different from other documentary films, although
they do present certain distinctive features, which are analyzed in this
chapter. Prominent among these are the types of archival materials they
use, which are usually classifiable as marginal, as they do not belong to
the official records of public history. In some cases, they can be found in
official archival institutions, but more commonly they are found in alter-
native sites, ranging from a family home to a social or recreational cen-
ter. The work involved in recovering them has something in common
with the work of the archaeologist, a figure with whom filmmakers like
Péter Forgács often identify, as is discussed in chapter 3. Emma Cocker
also invokes this figure in her analysis of the appropriation of archival
footage in contemporary practice. Cocker applies it mainly to the films
of Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, which
tend more toward a film essay style, while also containing a historio-
graphical perspective with microhistorical resonances: “The archaeolog-
ical excavation of buried or forgotten archival fragments within artists’
film and video thus has the capacity to serve a dual purpose: it attempts
 T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY45

to rescue or recuperate value for lost fragments and write them back into
history, at the same time as expose moments of deliberate exclusion
within the archive.”13 This idea of recovering marginal archives to “write
them back into history” is very much a feature of the microhistorical
films studied in the following chapters. However, Cocker suggests that
this appropriation generates “a potential disruption of the official order
of knowledge in favor of counter-hegemonic narratives capable of pro-
ducing new (indeed dissenting or resistant) forms of cultural memory,”14
an argument that would not apply to all microhistorical documentaries,
as they do not necessarily contain specifically counter-hegemonic narra-
tives, although they do offer an alternative discourse that can serve as a
complement to the dominant public history.
An overview of the microhistorical documentaries analyzed in this
book shows that they do use different types of archival documents (pub-
lic, amateur, family, personal; written, sound, audiovisual), although
those belonging to the audio/visual family archive (snapshots and home
movies) tend to predominate. Public archives—mainly newsreels and
TV news—are used occasionally, on the basis of their more conventional
informative nature, to provide a basic macrohistorical context within
which the microhistorical narratives can be placed. This is the case, for
example, of the documentaries on Japanese Americans incarcerated dur-
ing World War II, or of those dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian con-
flict. Sometimes the documentaries seek a deconstruction of this archi-
val footage, especially when it has the quality of propaganda, like the
newsreels made by the Hungarian communist regime included in Class
Lot or by the Khmer Rouge in The Missing Picture. In a few cases, footage
taken from fiction films may also be used, as it is in The Missing Picture,
and more significantly in History and Memory.
A second type of document appropriated in microhistorical docu-
mentaries comes from personal archives, referring in this case strictly to
materials related to individuals. Archival literature has been giving
increased attention to personal archives, expanding beyond its tradi-
tional focus on institutional archives organized according to professional
criteria to include materials related to and preserved by individuals,
regardless of whether such materials can be found in public archives.15
However, archival studies do not tend to distinguish between personal
and family archives, both of which are generally classified under the first
 4 6  T H E A RCH IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

term. While admittedly the boundaries between them are blurry, for this
study it seems appropriate to differentiate them, in terms of both their
provenance and their content. Snapshots and home movies belong spe-
cifically to the category of family archives, as they are made by different
family members, represent that family, and are preserved in the family
environment. However, diaries and letters are more suitably classified as
personal documents, as they are not generally shared with other family
members and are preserved privately. Certain official documents, like
IDs, are treated here as “personal,” based on their content.
Personal documents play an important role in some of the documen-
taries analyzed in this book. For example, in the opening to the film
From a Silk Cocoon, the filmmaker shows a box containing key docu-
ments belonging to her parents: their birth certificates and the official
letters confirming their renunciation and subsequent restoration of U.S.
citizenship. Similarly, at the beginning of A World Not Ours, the director
shows his childhood Palestinian refugee ID card, while in History and
Memory, Rea Tajiri shows her grandparents’ IDs. Of special importance
in three films analyzed here are personal letters and written diaries:
From a Silk Cocoon, Bophana, and Something Strong Within. The last of
these three films includes some brief but highly significant quotes from
the diaries of several Japanese Americans who lived in the concentration
camps. In From a Silk Cocoon the parents’ letters and diaries—read in a
voice-over—actually constitute the main source of information in the
film. A related issue worth raising here is whether the diary films of
David Perlov or Jonas Mekas would fall into this personal archive cate-
gory. As is explored in more detail in chapter 7, in the first stage of film-
ing as film diaries, they would fall into a border territory between what
could be defined as documents belonging to a personal archive and what
would be more suitably classified as family archive, since the filmed foot-
age often includes family members and friends.
As noted above, the family archive is the most common and specific
form of archive used in microhistorical documentary. Following Anna
Woodham and colleagues, the family archive is understood here as “an
extensive range of objects and documents they [the families] owned
which had a connection with past and present friends and family mem-
bers,” including “items such as photographs, certificates, books, letters
and recipes,” but also “items such as candlesticks, wine glasses, medals,
 T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY47

jewelry, [and] souvenirs.”16 In the films studied here, the inclusion of

nonphotographic objects is not common, although there are some excep-
tions worthy of mention for their symbolic importance, like the wooden
bird carved by Rea Tajiri’s grandmother in History and Memory. Among
audio/visual family archives—snapshots and home movies—this chap-
ter focuses mainly on the latter, which constitute the specifically audiovi-
sual form of these archives and, therefore, the most widely used. But
much of the discussion here about home movies could equally apply to
snapshots, understanding both as audio/visual manifestations of a “home
mode” of communication, a term originally proposed by Richard Chal-
fen and picked up by authors such as James M. Moran (who applies it to
home videos), Ryan Shand, and Tom Slootweg.17 In short, this home
mode could be defined as a mode of production and reception that includes
different audio/visual media (photography, film/video) that represent the
everyday life of the family and provide a communicative framework for
the intergenerational transmission of family stories.18 In this sense,
“home movies” may also be used as a generic term for the different types
of audiovisual records of the home mode, without necessarily distin-
guishing between the technologies that have been used historically: pho-
tochemical (film), magnetic (video), and digital. Obviously, technologi-
cal developments have resulted in changes to content, style, and viewing
habits. Film recording, limited by the length of the reels and by its rela-
tively high cost, was replaced by video, with its reduced time restrictions
and low cost, which also brought with it the inclusion of a wider range of
possible content. Finally, with digital technology, domestic recordings
have multiplied exponentially, but their status as documents and their
mnemonic function have given way to their communicative function. As
José Van Dijck puts it, the value of snapshots and home movies has
shifted from their function as mementos to their function as momentos,
as temporal deictics.19 Yet despite these developments, a number of com-
mon features remain that can still be classified as audio/visual expres-
sions of a single “home mode” of communication.
One last category that should be considered here is amateur film, a
type of archival material with its own specific characteristics, despite
often being associated with home moviemaking. Home movies have
sometimes been labeled as a type of amateur film, and the two terms
have occasionally been treated as synonyms, but such a categorization is
 4 8  T H E A RCH IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

rather reductive, at least when applied to the decades of use of small-

gauge cameras, from the 1920s to the 1970s (the main period of produc-
tion of the home movies and amateur films used in the microhistorical
documentaries analyzed in this book). This is recognized, for example,
by authors such as Shand and Slootweg, who offer an insightful means of
differentiating them, proposing to refer to amateur films as those made
in a “community mode” to distinguish them from the “home mode” that
characterizes home movies.20 “Amateur filmmaking,” as the term was
understood at least until the 1970s or 1980s, was a practice that sought to
imitate professional modes of filmmaking to a certain extent, chiefly by
following the main phases of their creative process (preproduction,
shooting, and postproduction), but without pursuing a commercial
objective. Amateur filmmakers made fiction films, documentaries, or
experimental films, presented their productions at festivals and in spe-
cific competitions, and in many cases had their own associations to share
their projects and develop their skills.21 Home movies, however, have
never sought to emulate professional filmmaking; they are “badly made”
films by professional standards, generally projected unedited and with-
out any postproduction. They also have a distinctively autobiographical
dimension, as filmmaker, “actors,” and audience generally all belong to
the same group: the family itself and/or its close circle of friends.22 Leav-
ing aside for the moment the changes that digital technology and the
internet have brought,23 it is worth clarifying that the boundary between
these two film modes was not always completely clear, although gener-
ally they can be distinguished based on the filming style and the absence
or presence of postproduction work. Charles Tepperman actually pro-
poses a kind of intermediate category that he calls “family chronicle
films,” made by amateur filmmakers with the usual themes of home
moviemaking. But although he does not delve into the distinction
between these two modes, his explanation of family chronicle films in
fact points to the difference between home movies and amateur films:
“In contrast to simple home movie footage, family films by serious ama-
teurs gave shape and structure to the personal relationships and quotid-
ian events that they recorded,” exploiting the camera’s capacity for
recording “as a tool for transfiguring the everyday and reflecting on their
place in it.”24
 T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY49

In the context of microhistorical documentaries, the distinction

between the two modes is often significant, especially in films con-
structed mainly using home movies, as is the case with Forgács’s work
and with films such as Something Strong Within and Israel: A Home
Movie. These works usually include a small proportion of footage taken
from amateur films, some of which exhibits qualities quite close to pro-
fessional filmmaking, expanding the range of topics and approaches,
with consequent effects on both their narratives and their reception.
Another interesting variant involves professional filmmakers doing
autobiographical projects with a microhistorical dimension, like For My
Children or A World Not Ours, which include domestic scenes filmed by
them but intended from the outset for the documentary, resulting in a
unique convergence of film practices. Separate consideration is needed
for Mekas, whose work is analyzed in chapter 7, who championed home
moviemaking as a more genuine approach to filmmaking, a premise on
which he developed his own way of making films, which ultimately
acquired the status of avant-garde cinema.

FAMILY A RCHIVES FOR A HI STORY

FROM BELOW

Family archives, and more specifically their audio/visual materials—

snapshots and home movies—have not received much attention from
professional historians. In film studies, there has been growing interest
in these archives, although research has focused more on their ethno-
graphic/cultural dimension—often in the more general context of
research on amateur films—than on their use as sources for historical
research and their appropriation in contemporary films. Authors such as
Patricia Zimmermann or Roger Odin point in this direction, but only
incidentally. In the introduction to Mining the Home Movie, Zimmer-
mann notes that recent historical research examines the hermeneutic
possibilities of home movies, looking at how they “can function as a
recorder, an interrogator, a deferral, a condensation, and a mediator of
historical traumas that extend beyond the self.”25 She also points out,
 50  T H E ARC H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

although without developing the argument, that when such footage is

used in contemporary media productions, it is conceptualized “as micro-
geographies and microhistories of minoritized and often invisible cul-
tures that are social and highly political.”26 Odin also reflects briefly on
the different uses of home movies in contemporary filmmaking, ranging
from their use as visual documents of past times to what he considers the
most interesting case, the exploration of their contradictions as docu-
ments, based on readings as diverse as documentarist, private, emo-
tional, historical, or fictional.27
From a microhistorical perspective, it is clear that audiovisual family
archives constitute a valuable source for a history from below, since they
focus on the lives, cycles, and rites of ordinary “anonymous” families,
outside of the official records of public events that are the general con-
cern of traditional archives. While it is true that in the first decades of its
existence the technology to make home movies was available only to
wealthy families, as early as the 1950s access to the technology had spread
to the middle classes in Western countries and continued expanding
with the arrival of home video and finally with the incorporation of cam-
era functions into cell phones, resulting today in a universe of ephemeral
fragments existing in virtual “clouds.” This situation is a long way from
Derrida’s theory of the archive as a place under the control of the archons
(an ancient Greek term that originally referred to magistrates who repre-
sented the law, and who therefore had the role of guarding documents
and the responsibility for interpreting them), as family archives do not
generally form part of public archives and are not subject to the scrutiny
of professional archivists.28 It has been only since the 1980s that film
archives began collecting home movies, at a time when, paradoxically,
this type of footage was growing exponentially thanks to video, which
often ended up turning the focus of the preservation efforts onto materi-
als recorded on photochemical film. The contemporary context, with
constant recording on cell phones and archiving on personal computers
or virtual private servers, has complicated the archivist’s task even more,
while at the same time raising questions about the future recoverability
of these archives.
The domestic nature of these archives also underscores the previously
noted underlying duality, especially present in audiovisual documents,
of any archival document as both a transparent trace of the past and a
 T H E A R C HIVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY51

construction made of that past. Contemporary studies tend to highlight

the quality of the archival materials as constructions that offer only lim-
ited access to the past, a view influenced partly by the Foucauldian
understanding of the archive as “the general system of the formation and
transformation of statements” (related either to events or to things) regu-
lated by laws that determine their subsistence or disappearance.29 But the
audiovisual document possesses an evidentiary force, based on the
indexical nature of recorded sounds and images, which triggers a recep-
tion that contradicts its definition as constructed discourse. Of special
importance here is the line of argument beginning with André Bazin
and generally including Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida or Susan Son-
tag’s On Photography, perhaps best encapsulated in Barthes’s assertion
that in photography “the power of authentication exceeds the power of
representation.”30 This phenomenological view of the photographic
image acquires greater force in the case of snapshots and home movies,
as their noncommercial nature and their unprofessional formal features
give them a surplus of authenticity that underscores their quality as a
trace of the past. This acquires a special resonance in the case of images
of relatives who have died, which highlights their condition as memento
mori, marked by the contrast between the physical absence of the loved
ones and their vicarious presence in the images.
Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored that snapshots and home movies
are representations, with their own formal and thematic codes. Domes-
tic images conceal as much as they reveal, since they focus on the happy
and celebratory moments of life. This could be understood as a kind of
falsification of reality, in an excessively reductive interpretation of the
home mode of communication. Instead, it would be more appropriate to
view them metonymically, as representations that do not claim to deny
or disguise the dark times or the sad moments, but that leave them out-
side the frame by virtue of their very nature. This bias toward the celebra-
tory could also be explained by the fact that, beyond their commemora-
tive nature (marking a birthday or a wedding), such events have a
performative dimension that makes them more suitable for recording on
film. Another question that might be considered relates to the patriar-
chal gaze that these kinds of images may be imbued with, as the father
was so often the one filming.31 However, the social evolution of family
dynamics and the increasing accessibility of the technology has dissolved
 52  T H E ARCH IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

this dynamic and its potential bias, progressively turning home movies
into an experience shared by all members of the family, in terms of both
creation and commentary.
In this context, the definition of snapshots and home movies as his-
torical sources also reveals an evolution of the concept of archives itself.
This evolution has run parallel to that of historiography, which has seen
the development of social and cultural history and a more open under-
standing of archives, increasingly including peripheral manifestations
like family archives. These prove especially suited to microhistorical
research, since it involves a reduced scale of observation and foregrounds
human agency. The fragmentary and nonsystematic nature of these
archives also fits in well with the concept of the miniature proposed by
Alf Lüdtke—in his explanation of the Alltagsgeschichte, the history of
everyday life—to stress the small scale where “the ‘density’ of life situa-
tions and contexts of action can be made vivid and palpable.”32 Lüdtke
proposes creating a collage or mosaic with those miniatures to form
societal “patchwork” structures, linking them together in a network of
interrelations, thereby addressing the issue of how to apply the knowl-
edge acquired on the micro-scale to larger historical frameworks.33 Any
family archive could be understood as a patchwork that acquires mean-
ing in the most immediate interpretation of the family circle it belongs
to, but that also acquires a broader, historiographical value when it is
used by a historian/filmmaker to construct a microhistorical narrative.
This “family archival patchwork” gives access to the past in its own ways,
revealing through its particular stories the social and cultural tapestry of
an era: its types of celebrations, religious or secular rituals, leisure habits,
and so on. But also, due to the descriptive quality inherent in the image,
it can provide valuable information on public spaces, types of housing,
styles of dress, and so on, which are expanded to elements of sound as
well (forms of speech, soundscapes) with the introduction of home video.
One last element that should not be overlooked is the recording of public
events by home moviemakers, which can offer perspectives complemen-
tary to public records, sometimes becoming the only testimony, as
occurred with the famous footage of the assassination of J. F. Kennedy
filmed by Abraham Zapruder.
This fragmentary quality of family archives also foregrounds the limi-
tations of their reconstruction of the past, a significant issue in the work
 THE ARCHIVE IN THE MICROHISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY53

of microhistorians, but which in fact affects any historiographical

endeavor, as Carolyn Steedman points out: “Historians read for what is
not there: the silences and the absences of the documents always speak to
us.”34 This issue is actually central in Didi-Huberman’s aforementioned
book Images in Spite of All, which is articulated around the historio-
graphical value of four photographs taken secretly at Auschwitz, directly
pointing to his argument that “history is constructed around perpetu-
ally questioned lacunae.”35 Didi-Huberman actually goes further, pre-
senting these photographs as examples of a “lacuna-image,” and at the
same time a “trace-image” and a “disappearance-image”: “Something—
very little, a film—remains of a process of annihilation. . . . It is neither
full presence nor absolute silence. It is neither resurrection, nor death
without remains. . . . It is a world proliferating with lacunae, with singu-
lar images which, placed together in a montage, will encourage readabil-
ity, an effect of knowledge.”36 This idea has a special resonance for micro-
historians, who generally work with marginal archives in which the
lacunae are even more palpable than they are in institutional archives,
leading Ginzburg to propose conjecture as a method based on his con-
cept of the “evidential paradigm,” mentioned in chapter 1.37 The docu-
mentaries analyzed here are generally located in this historiographical
context, as their main archival sources, family archives, have not been
subject to professional preservation and cataloging, and exhibit an obvi-
ously fragmentary quality due to both the selective nature of their repre-
sentations and the nonsystematic organization of their content.

T H E FI LMIC A PPROPRIATION O F HOME MOV I ES

All family archival footage undergoes a distinctive change when it is

appropriated in a documentary film: what was formerly an archive
belonging to a family, to be shown only to family and friends, now
becomes public.38 As Julia J. Noordegraaf and Elvira Pouw affirm, this
change makes the attribution of meaning to the family archive “an open
and dynamic process, mediated by the various contexts through which
the material travels.”39 This issue is also addressed by Jaimie Baron in the
wider framework of the appropriation of film archives, when she defines
 54  T H E A RC H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

the archival document as an experience of reception based on two crite-

ria: temporal and intentional disparity.40 Baron suggests that for an
archival document to be recognized as such, the spectator must be aware
of a temporal disparity between the then of the document and the now of
the making of the film that has appropriated it, a disparity that has to be
evident within the film. Additionally, the archival document may also
exhibit a disparity of intentions: a difference between the intentions of
the original document and the new ones that emerge when it is appropri-
ated in a new film. Baron explores the appropriation of home movies in
one of the chapters of her book, pointing out that the most significant
disparity of their appropriation is intentional, related to the change from
being a familiar/private document to becoming publicly accessible. This
may imply a kind of transgression that has become clearer in the times of
home video and digital media, since the range of situations filmed has
broadened beyond the typical happy scenes of home movies. The author
even goes as far as suggesting that our interest in the appropriation of
home movies is “fundamentally and unavoidably voyeuristic—offering
us the pleasure of seeing something we were not ‘meant to see.’ ” 41 How-
ever, the relocation of home movies into the public sphere does not nec-
essarily imply an intentional disparity. There are actually many examples
of home movies used in contemporary documentaries that essentially
retain their original value. It could thus be argued instead that the tem-
poral disparity is a more relevant factor in the appropriation of home
movies.42 This is especially clear in microhistorical documentaries, par-
ticularly in those that take an autobiographical approach, where the
presence of loved ones vests the family archive with a singular reso-
nance that relies heavily on the temporal disparity, on the tension
between their being here, with us in the film, and far away, alive in their
past time.
These differences arising from the twofold disparity of the archival
document relate to processes of resignification affecting all archival foot-
age when it is reused in contemporary cinema. Such processes tend to
introduce modifications or expansions to their original meanings, result-
ing from their migration from their original context to a new one, thereby
placing them in a new chain of meaning. To study these processes, I
adopt a partially modified version of the typology proposed by Rebecca
Swender to examine appropriation practices.43 Swender posits three
 T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY55

possible strategies: naturalization, contradiction, and underscoring of

conventional specificity. The first, naturalization, happens when the
appropriated document keeps its original set of values in the new film,
or, as Swender explains, “when the capacity for instability of meaning is
deemphasized.” 44 The second type of appropriation involves a situation
where the document’s standard meanings are contested or contradicted.
This occurs, according to Swender, when the main text destabilizes the
meaning of the original document, exposing its supposed truth claim or
adding new context that gives it supplementary meanings.45 The third
type, underscoring of conventional specificity, happens when all the ele-
ments of the original footage direct the viewer toward a preferred read-
ing, supporting a particular historical truth claim, regardless of how it is
subsequently reused (Swender identifies the Zapruder film as an example
of this type).46 This third strategy is not really relevant to the appropria-
tion of family archival materials, since it would be highly unusual to find
family images with a conventional specificity for the general public. I
propose instead a different third strategy, which I refer to as historiciza-
tion, related to the social and historical implications of this type of archi-
val material when it is reused in a new film.
When applying this typology to the use of archival materials in micro-
historical documentaries, we can see, first, how they can be incorporated
in a naturalized way, retaining their original set of values, usually as
visual support for the filmmaker’s narrative. An interesting case of such
naturalized recycling can be seen in films composed—entirely or
mostly—of home movies shot by a relative from a previous generation,
with the contemporary filmmaker serving as an intermediary between
the family footage and the viewing public. Examples of this can be found
in films such as A Letter Without Words (1998), El misterio de los ojos
escarlata (1993), or La línea paterna (1994). All three of these cases are
very close to what Paul John Eakin has defined in literature as “proxi-
mate collaborative autobiography,” referring to narratives about some
relative or close friend, with two people speaking in the first person, and
the authors talking about their own lives while recounting those of their
loved ones.47 In A Letter Without Words, this is taken to the point where
Lisa Lewenz literally shares authorship of her film with her grandmother,
Ella, who shot home movies and amateur films in Germany up to 1938,
when she immigrated to the United States.
 56  T H E A RC H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

There are also microhistorical documentaries where the original

meanings of the home movies are contested or contradicted. This strat-
egy is most common in cases where they are used while narrating trau-
matic family events, forcing a contrast between the standard happy
scenes portrayed in home movies and the harsh events of the family’s
past, usually conveyed by a voice-over provided by the filmmaker or
interviews with family members. A clear example of this strategy can be
found in A Family Gathering, while a more ambiguous variant is observ-
able in Something Strong Within, involving home movies of Japanese
Americans filmed in the concentration camps. Another interesting case
is that of the films of Forgács, such as The Maelstrom or El Perro Negro.
In these two films, most of the scenes of everyday life and leisure come
from happy periods in the lives of these families before the war. But the
interpretation of these scenes through the prism of the tragic fate suf-
fered by the home moviemakers—the Peereboom and the Salvans fami-
lies, respectively—assigns them a new value that undermines the happy
portrait suggested in an initial reading of the images.
The third strategy proposed here, historicization, refers directly to the
historical dimension of home movies and snapshots, to their nature as
records of past events and times, whether they show public events or
bear witness to the ordinary life of a particular community in a bygone
era. As Odin suggests, “home movies are sometimes the only records of
some racial, ethnographic, cultural, social communities marginalized by
the official version of history.” 48 The family archive thus becomes a valu-
able source of documentation for microhistorical perspectives absent
from official public histories. To this end, the filmmakers also need to
give these materials a historical representativeness, bringing them into
dialogue with their macrohistorical contexts in order to underscore their
value as historical documents that transcend their more immediate
meaning as records of everyday life.
This third strategy can in fact be used simultaneously with either nat-
uralization or contradiction, expanding the layers of meaning that this
material acquires in its contemporary reuse. This can be seen, for exam-
ple, in the previously cited films A Letter Without Words, El misterio de
los ojos escarlata, and La línea paterna, all of which generally respect the
original meaning of the reused footage but vest it with a new dimension
as a document of a past era. In a way, this expansion of meaning is
 T H E A R C HIVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY57

already implicit in the original footage, as the original filmmakers were

more aware of their role as witnesses of their time, particularly in con-
nection to public events or to local traditions shot in a more ethnographic
style. In the case of A Letter Without Words, this historical consciousness
comes into the foreground in the footage of the grandmother of the film-
maker, enhanced by quotations taken from her diary and personal let-
ters. In this way, the filmmaker constructs a microhistorical chronicle of
Germany between the wars, blending historical processes and family
affairs into a single narrative. A more ethnographic approach is revealed
in El misterio de los ojos escarlata, where Alfredo J. Anzola brings
together footage shot by his father, Edgar, in the early decades of the
twentieth century, offering a rather unfamiliar portrait of Venezuela,
even for its own people. La línea paterna is more intimate, but still offers
an insightful portrayal of the traditions and social customs of Papantla,
the Mexican region where José Buil, the filmmaker’s grandfather, lived
for many years.
Among the more personal approaches, there are some remarkable
films where the sociohistorical context is a prominent factor in the way
the filmmakers use their families’ home movies, usually because their
personal quest leads them necessarily to explore those sociohistorical
contexts. One such film is Yidl in the Middle (1999), in which the film-
maker, Marlene Booth, reflects on what it was like to grow up Jewish in
the postwar years in Iowa, where Jewish people were a very small minor-
ity. She uses her family’s home movies in a naturalized way, as visual
support for her autobiographical narrative. But she goes further, since
the home movies become key visual proof of how her family struggled
between identification with the community and fidelity to Jewish cus-
toms and traditions. The filmmaker summarizes this struggle in the
final minutes of the film, where her home movies become the site of con-
vergence of the public and private, the historical and the personal, as she
makes explicit in her voice-over: “When I look at them, I see how eager
we were to be just as Iowa as possible. Growing up with two distinct sides
gave me a unique perspective. . . . I am learning now to see difference
and to seek common ground. Maybe that’s what it means to be a yiddle
in the middle.”
A significant historicized tension is also present in the use of family
archives in the documentaries analyzed in the following chapters, from
 58  T H E ARC H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

the films of Forgács to the documentaries on the incarceration of Japa-

nese Americans or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All these films show
how documentaries can construct microhistorical narratives through an
appropriation of family archives that delves into their dimension as his-
torical sources, while at the same time exploring them with creative per-
spectives quite distinct from those of conventional historiographical
practices.

FR OM COL L ECTIVE PORT RA I TS TO

FA MILY HISTORIES

Regardless of the different values and meanings acquired by audiovisual

family archives when appropriated in microhistorical documentaries,
they are often structured in the films that appropriate them according to
two main categories: collective portraits and family histories. The first type,
in which filmmakers use home movies to create collective portraits, refers
to films that may not at first seem to reflect a microhistorical perspective,
as their focus is not on a specific milieu like an individual, a family, or a
village, but on settings of a broader scope. However, their historical per-
spective can still be classified as microhistorical, first of all because their
reliance on home movies as their main visual historical sources entails
the reduced scale of observation that is so essential to microhistory. Their
approach is also clearly in keeping with the patchwork structure pro-
posed by Lüdtke, creating sociohistorical collages with a microhistorical
quality.49 There probably are not many documentaries that belong to this
category, but those that do are noteworthy. These include two cases that
are analyzed in the chapters that follow: Something Strong Within and
Israel: A Home Movie. Other interesting variations on the model are the
French film Mémoire d’outremer and the Russian film Private Chronicles:
Monologue, both of which are analyzed briefly here. These two docu-
mentaries straddle the line between macro- and microhistory, as on the
one hand they cover extended historical periods (the French colonial
period and the final decades of the Soviet Union, respectively), but on
the other they make use of home movies as their main archival sources.
Both use them in a manner that lies halfway between naturalized and
 THE ARCHIVE IN THE MICROHISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY59

historicized appropriation: they do not attempt to contradict the most

obvious values conveyed in the home movie footage, but they do priori-
tize its status as a sociohistorical document over its nature as a domestic
portrait, which is actually blurred by the fact that the footage is never
linked specifically to the families represented.
Mémoire d’outremer (1997) deals with the life of French colonizers
from the 1920s to the 1960s. Filmmaker Claude Bossion made his film
mainly with home movies shot by people living in the colonies, mixing
scenes from different countries and apparently organizing them in
chronological order (although many of them are not explicitly dated).
The soundtrack, however, reinforces the collage effect of the film as a
whole by employing very different verbal sources (often unrelated to the
images): official reports, encyclopedia entries, personal and official let-
ters, and interviews with some of the actual home moviemakers or the
people filmed. The combination of visual and verbal sources from differ-
ent times and places creates a polyphonic text that seeks a resonance that
transcends an ordinary home movie viewing, foregrounding its sketchy
and unscripted condition. This condition is identified by Ben Highmore
as a key feature in the representation of everydayness, which comes to its
fullest when it is characterized by an improvised quality.50 Highmore
points to Impressionist painting as an example of this approach, but it
could also be applied to the representation offered by home movies, which
similarly combine subject matter and form to capture the unscripted
nature of the everyday.
This portrait of colonizers is intended to offer new insights into the
history of colonization, related not so much to their macrohistorical con-
text (although some of the verbal sources do provide contextualizing
commentary), but to the history of their everyday life. Its chronicle of
past times through family archives elicits a mood of nostalgia for a
bygone way of life. However, this nostalgic component does not imply a
justification of the problematic issues associated with colonization, as
Rachael Langford seems to argue. Langford laments the absence of
“images of political meetings, demonstrations, bombings, or police
actions,” which, in her view, results in a depiction of colonialism not “as
a struggle, but as a consensual project,” and as “a private affair.”51 This
interpretation, however, seems to overlook the fact that the film’s
approach is closely tied to the nature of the visual material used, a
 6 0  T H E ARC H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

misunderstanding also evident in her classification of the footage as

“amateur films” and never as home movies. It is true that a few sequences
seem closer to amateur filmmaking, such as the harvesting scenes in the
region of Souk El Khemis, or the scene showing the Mission Ophtal-
mologique Saharianne. But most of the sequences would be more suit-
ably categorized as home moviemaking, as they show the activities of the
filmmakers’ families, like weddings, first communions, hunting excur-
sions, and so on. The film’s portrait of everyday life cannot therefore be
considered false or fictional, as Langford describes it,52 because it speaks
about colonization from a different perspective, a microhistorical one,
through the ordinary situations of the families shown in the home mov-
ies. This does not preclude the fact that the film also shows the spectator
the differences in social and working conditions between the French
colonizers and the African people, thus implicitly revealing the social
consequences of colonization through a microhistorical lens.
Private Chronicles: Monologue (1999) constitutes a particularly unique
case due to its hybrid nature, based on framing the archival material
within a fictional framework. The film offers a portrait of Russian society
from the 1960s to the 1980s exclusively through the use of home movies
from that period. Arranging the footage chronologically by year (from
1961 to1986), filmmaker Vitaly Manskij selects from a vast collection to
offer us the imagined autobiography of a Russian—speaking in a voice-
over—born in 1961. Despite this fictional framework, the film succeeds
in offering a rather sketchy depiction of Russian society over that period,
reinforcing the representation of “everydayness” through the kind of
improvised quality described by Highmore.53 Manskij stresses the hybrid
nature of his film by placing his fictional protagonist within a clear his-
torical context, beginning and ending each chapter with a caption speci-
fying the year, accompanied by a photograph, frequently of a major fig-
ure in the public history of that period. The overall result is not entirely
satisfying because the filmmaker often seems to look for an all-too-
perfect match between image and voice-over, thereby dismantling the
unsophisticated truth value of home movies and foregrounding the con-
structedness of the approach. Despite this weakness, the visuals offer a
rather surprising portrait of the Russian society of that time, demon-
strating how a change of scale can provide new insights into our histori-
cal knowledge. This visual portrait undermines the stereotypes that
 T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY61

most Western spectators probably had of the Soviet regime, showing

parties, dinners, dancing, vacations at seaside resorts, and so on, all shot
by home moviemakers using small-gauge cameras, a product typically
associated with capitalist societies. These “private moments” are never-
theless intermingled with footage of events more commonly associated
with the official public image of the regime, such as the typical Soviet
military parades. The overall impression is rather like a collage made
with miniatures to form societal “patchwork” structures, evocative of
Lüdtke’s concept of Alltagsgeschichte discussed above.54
Private Chronicles: Monologue also shows how home movies can
reflect the understanding of everyday life suggested by Michel de Cer-
teau: as a site of resistance against the standardization promoted by the
institutional powers. This resistance—a mixture of given inertias and
inventive deviations—is to be found, according to Certeau, in how “pop-
ular procedures (also ‘miniscule’ and quotidian) manipulate the mecha-
nisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them.”55
In this context, home movies can clearly qualify as one of the “the innu-
merable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space orga-
nized by techniques of sociocultural production,” thereby bringing to
light “the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-
shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘dis-
cipline.’ ”56 In Private Chronicles: Monologue, this is reflected in the
scenes of everyday life, which show little of the orthodoxy appropriate to
an official Marxist state. Instead, they resemble scenes familiar to West-
ernized societies, with their citizens’ attachment to habits of leisure and
consumerism. They also show a certain clash between private and public
spaces, linking the celebration of parties and dancing to private homes,
in contrast to the official celebrations that occupy the public sphere.
Apart from these collective portraits, there are a significant number
of films that use snapshots and home movies to compose personal and
family narratives deeply embedded in their historical contexts. These
films usually reflect a microhistorical approach, with an in-depth study
of an individual or a family as the route through which a historical
period can be understood, expressing the microhistorical goal to offer “a
prosopography from below in which the relationships, decisions,
restraints, and freedoms faced by real people in actual situations would
emerge.”57 This is especially evident in the films of Forgács analyzed in
 6 2  T H E ARC H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

chapter 3. To differing degrees, this also characterizes most of the other

films analyzed in this book, particularly A Family Gathering, For My
Children, and A World Not Ours.
As the case of Forgács’s films demonstrate, the filmmaker’s relation-
ship to the home movies does not necessarily have to be autobiographi-
cal in order to construct a microhistorical narrative based on a family
archive. Other interesting cases of this nonautobiographical approach
include the Czech documentary series Private Century (Soukromé století,
2006), made by Jan Kikl, and the documentary Y in Vyborg (Hetket jotka
jäivät, 2005), by the Finnish filmmaker Pia Andell. Private Century is
composed of eight 52-minute episodes, made using the home movies of
different Czech families filmed between the 1920s and 1960s, comple-
mented with a voice-over narration—usually in first person—constructed
on the basis of the memories of the people featured in the footage. The
stories tend to focus on the ups and downs of the families, but in at least
three of the episodes the family history and public history become more
clearly intertwined, attaining a significant microhistorical dimension.
Two of these episodes, “See You in Denver” and “With Kisses from Your
Love,” offer a clearer microhistorical view of Czechoslovakia’s commu-
nist regime, further supported in the second case by the letters that the
father sent from prison. The third, “Small Russian Clouds of Smoke,”
maintains a kind of microhistorical tension to show a different facet of the
country: a portrait of the Russian community living in Czechia, seen
through the story of the Popov family. On the other hand, Y in Vyborg
traces the life of the Ypyä family in Finland from 1939 to 1949. Following
the outbreak of war with Russia in 1939, Ypyä’s wife and children had to
leave Vyborg, and during the war years the couple communicated in let-
ters, but also by making home movies. The filmmaker constructs her
documentary using this valuable family archive, piecing together a story
with an intense emotional charge that offers an interesting microhistori-
cal perspective on those complicated years in its contrast between the
times of peace and of war, and between life in a town far from the con-
flict and on the front line in Vyborg. The combination of home movies
and personal letters also provides an effective balance to its microhistori-
cal narrative, with images focusing on everyday family life (although
also revealing the signs of war in Vyborg), complemented with the more
intimate story told in the letters (read in a voice-over), focusing on the
hardships of separation and war.
 T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICAL DOCUMEN TA RY63

Family archives, however, have most commonly been explored in

microhistorical documentaries from autobiographical perspectives, as is
the case in several of the films analyzed in subsequent chapters, such as
A Family Gathering, For My Children, and A World Not Ours. Filmmak-
ers working with an autobiographical approach often resort to their own
family archives of snapshots and home movies in their quest for valuable
traces of personal identity. Such an approach possesses a quality that is
somehow distinct from nonautobiographical appropriation, where home
movies may add a strong sense of authenticity but remain somehow
mute, enclosed in their anonymity, preventing us from knowing their
stories, especially when they are used as visual illustrations of a macro-
historical narrative. In contrast, when autobiographical filmmakers use
snapshots and home movies of their own families, different dynamics
are usually generated, beginning with the fact of naming the people in
those movies. That deictic act of recognizing the images as their own,
usually conveyed through the filmmaker’s voice-over, testifies to their
real existence in the historical world, placing them in a specific time and
place. Their home movies and snapshots thus become “mediated mem-
ory objects”—a term proposed by Van Dijck 58—that help filmmakers
travel metaphorically back to their past, to their origins, in what is a nec-
essary step for so many autobiographical endeavors. Such family archives
may thus reflect an understanding of the archive as the mediator for the
impossible return to the places of origin that Steedman finds in Derrida’s
Archive Fever, where “desire for the archive is presented as part of the
desire to find, or locate, or possess that moment of origin, as the begin-
ning of things.”59
Autobiographical filmmakers look at their own home movies primar-
ily as members of the original audience of the films, their families, par-
ticipating in the “affiliative look” elicited by family images, as Marianne
Hirsch suggests, “through which we [the members of the family] are
sutured into the image and through which we adopt the image into our
own familial narrative.” 60 In this sense, the contemporary recycling of
the filmmakers’ home movies can be understood as an extension of the
very process of home moviemaking, which is not complete until the
films are projected and commented on by the family members, creating
an ephemeral soundtrack missing from the filmstrip. Now it is the film-
maker who adds that commentary to the soundtrack, setting it down
permanently for anyone who watches the film thereafter. This provides
 6 4  T H E A RCH IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO R I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

the spectators with guidelines for contextualizing the images, enabling

them to somehow share the “affiliative look” of the original family. This
is in fact one of the biggest challenges for these filmmakers, since they
need to provide sufficient justification for their family archive to be part
of a public film, so that the spectator does not feel like an intruder, but
rather a part of their family, a welcome guest to the family screening.
The use of the filmmaker’s own home movies can also give rise to an
interesting variation on the concept of “postmemory” posited by Hirsch,
as mentioned in chapter 1. Hirsch describes this concept as the relation-
ship of a second generation to powerful and often traumatic experiences
that preceded their births, but that were nevertheless transmitted to
them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.61
Although she does not explicitly relate her concept to microhistory, her
emphasis on family photographs as key documents to fill the generation
gap in this process of postmemory suggests the connection is a suitable
one. This concept is discussed here mainly with reference to the autobio-
graphical documentaries studied in chapter 4—A Family Gathering,
From a Silk Cocoon, and History and Memory—although the traumatic
memories recounted in some of these films do not belong strictly to a
former generation, since the filmmakers actually took part in the events
as children. However, they were in a sense unconscious victims of the
traumatic events, and they needed to reach adulthood before they could
re-evaluate that traumatic past, aided by the mnemonic link provided by
home movies and snapshots.
As has been made clear in this chapter, the main archival sources used
in microhistorical documentaries come from the family archive (in most
cases home movies). This is a type of archival material that is very well
suited to a microhistorical approach, as it involves a reduced scale of
observation and makes human agency a central focus. Filmmakers can
reuse these family archival documents in various ways to construct their
microhistorical narratives, respecting their original meaning or explor-
ing their contradictions, but always emphasizing their value as historical
sources for a narrative that provides an alternative or complementary
vision of public history. These and other aspects are explored in the dif-
ferent case studies examined in the chapters that follow.
 3
PÉTER FORGÁCS’S HOME MOVIE CHRONICLE
OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The Maelstrom, Free Fall, and Class Lot

A
s discussed in chapter 2, the use of audio/visual family
archives—and more specifically, home movies—has become
increasingly common in contemporary filmmaking, often
drawing on their potential as historical sources for microhistorical proj-
ects. However, it is rare to find a filmmaker like the Hungarian Péter
Forgács, whose oeuvre is made mainly out of home movies (and, more
occasionally, amateur films).
Forgács developed an interest in this type of material originally as an
archivist. In 1983 he began creating his own collection of Hungarian
home movies and amateur films, the Private Photo & Film Archives, with
the objective of preserving the visual traces of everyday Hungary. In 1988
he received a grant to make films based on his archive material, which was
how he came to make his first documentary, The Bartos Family, released
that same year. Since then, he has made more than thirty works using
home movies and amateur films, most of them feature-length documen-
taries. Notable among these is the series named Private Hungary, com-
prising fifteen titles, although his filmography also includes films made
with footage from other (mostly European) countries. The distinctive
nature of his work also lies in the fact that its purpose is not merely infor-
mative, nor can it be reduced to a mere compilation of archival footage;
instead, it is closer to the work of an auteur, who intervenes decisively in
the material, both in the visuals and the soundtrack. After more than
 6 6 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

three decades, his filmography has gained international prominence,

with screenings and awards at numerous festivals and museums.1 He has
also aroused the interest of academics, who have published a wide range
of writings on his work, some of which are included in the anthology
Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács.2
Forgács takes a number of different approaches to home movie foot-
age, ranging from the ethnographic to the historical. If we adopt the
typology introduced in chapter 2 in relation to the appropriation of the
family archive, his use of this footage can be considered somewhere
between naturalized and historicized. Many of his documentaries could
be understood as cases of “domestic ethnography,” with none of the auto-
biographical connotations that this term has for Michael Renov,3 but in a
sense of its own, as they could be described as ethnographic portraits
created out of the footage filmed by the families featured in them, used
in many cases without substantially changing their original meaning.
Moreover, Forgács’s films often include a historiographical dimension, in
that they offer an investigation into the past that foregrounds the use of
home movies as historical documents. This investigation usually has a
microhistorical focus that is more or less explicit, related in different ways
to the public history of the period concerned. This is in fact the focus of
this chapter: an analysis of the films of Péter Forgács as microhistorical
documentaries.
The microhistorical dimension of Forgács’s films has not been system-
atically discussed in any previous studies, or by the filmmaker himself
when explaining his work. It is true that Forgács sometimes uses a related
term, “private history” (which is referred to in the title of his series Pri-
vate Hungary), as a way of defining his films and distinguishing them
“from the ‘Grande Histoire,’ the notion of public history.” 4 This micro-
historical concern is also evident when Forgács explains that home mov-
ies interest him “because they reveal a level of history that is recorded in
no other kind of cinema—a level of history . . . that can show us a great
many things about the realities and complexities of history as it is lived
by real people.”5 Forgács also points to the key issue of the representa-
tiveness of home movies later in the same interview: “These films are full
of revelatory moments about how it was there. . . . If these revelations of
self are then placed in a context where you can sense the whole culture,
its history and background, and how particular personalities fit into it,
 P É T ER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE67

the results become very dynamic.” 6 Forgács’s observation about the level
of history that home movies can reveal brings to mind the point made by
Jacques Revel (mentioned in chapter 1) about the change of scale not only
increasing “the size of the object caught in the viewfinder” but also alter-
ing the shape and framing, changing “the very content of what is being
represented.”7 Revel is actually quoted (in a footnote) by Roger Odin at
the beginning of his analysis of The Bartos Family, although he does not
subsequently explore this approach in the rest of his chapter.8 Ruth Balint
and Balázs Varga also associate Forgács’s filmography with microhistory,
but they do not develop the connection.9
To study Forgács’s films as microhistory, I propose, first, a two-part
overview of his filmography to establish a better contextualization of his
work: a classification or typology of his films that identifies his different
approaches to history and everyday life, and a brief review of his filmog-
raphy as a chronicle of the history of the twentieth century. I then under-
take a close analysis of the three Forgács films that most clearly display a
microhistorical approach: The Maelstrom, Free Fall, and Class Lot.

TOWARD A TYPOLOGY OF
PÉTER FORGÁCS’ S FI LMS

To better understand the historiographical perspective of Péter Forgács’s

work, it seems appropriate first to categorize the different approaches
taken in his feature-length films. This categorization is not intended to
be exhaustive or to rigidly pigeonhole his creative projects, and it will be
limited to his films based mainly on home movies and amateur films.
This is in fact Forgács’s most common approach and also the one that
generally exhibits a more explicitly microhistorical dimension. In this
corpus of films, four basic types or categories can be identified: essay
films, domestic ethnographies, collective portraits, and those that can
more properly be labeled microhistorical films.
The essay films would include Bourgeois Dictionary (1992) and Witt-
genstein Tractatus (1992), although Kádár’s Kiss (1997), A Bibó Reader
(2001), and Venom (2016) could also be placed in this category with some
qualifications. In the first two films it seems quite clear that Forgács has
 6 8 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

opted for a format that is not intended to construct a historical narrative

but to reflect on the role of small-gauge film formats in relation to non-
historical categories. The case of Kádár’s Kiss is more ambiguous, as the
film is characterized mostly by an essayistic approach, although the
images are dated chronologically and there are some clear references to
Hungary’s political history. In A Bibó Reader (2001), a reflection on the
work of this Hungarian intellectual takes priority over his personal biog-
raphy. In the case of Venom, its more experimental approach also sug-
gests a categorization halfway between essay film and documentary.
The category of domestic ethnography includes films dealing with
family histories, with a narrative structure that traces the family’s biog-
raphy, marked by a focus on the family portrait and on aspects of local
culture. With some specific qualifications for each film, this category
could include The Bartos Family (1988), Dusi & Jenő (1988), The Diary of
Mr. N (1990), The Notebook of a Lady (1994), Miss Universe 1929 (2006), I
Am Von Höfler (2008), and Picturesque Epochs (2016). None of these films
are completely divorced from the macrohistorical contexts to which
their biographies belong, but their main focus is more on personal and
family lives, lifestyles and customs, and the everyday spaces (private and
public) they inhabited. Public history is therefore not given special atten-
tion, although it may occasionally slip through the cracks of the ethno-
graphic narrative, sometimes in significant ways.
The third category is made up of collective portraits. This category
includes Simply Happy (1993), Meanwhile Somewhere . . . 1940–1943
(1994), The Danube Exodus (1998), El Perro Negro (2005), Hunky Blues
(2009), and GermanUnity@Balaton (2011). In these cases, Forgács still
works with home movies and amateur films, but, rather than focusing
on a family history, he creates group portraits, generational frescoes, or
historical collages. The collective nature of these portraits is not per se an
obstacle to considering them microhistorical, as was explained in chap-
ter 2; nevertheless, these films do not really take a clear microhistorical
approach, although they exhibit some features of such an approach, in
terms of both the type of archival material used and their focus on anon-
ymous histories. Perhaps the most borderline case would be El Perro
Negro, which is articulated largely around the histories of the Salvans
family and of Eduardo Noriega, although the film ultimately transcends
these two histories to offer a broader overview of the Spanish Civil War.
 P É T E R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE69

The fourth category is made up of films that can more properly be

described as microhistorical, based on family histories of individuals of
no significance to public history, analyzed by Forgács with a historio-
graphical intention that frames them as meaningful to better understand
macrohistorical contexts. It is worth considering whether The Bishop’s
Garden (2002) might be included in this category, although as it deals
with a public figure in the Hungary of his day, it does not really fit into
the “history from below” approach typical in microhistory. A clearer
example is Angelos’ Film (1999), despite the fact that the footage filmed by
Angelos Papanastassiou was also intended to reflect events of public
history—World War II and the Nazi occupation—in Athens. Finally, the
most paradigmatic cases of this category would be the films The Mael-
strom (1997), Free Fall (1996), and Class Lot (1997).

PÉTER FORGÁCS,
T WENTIETH- CEN TURY HI STOR I A N

While the degree of the historiographical perspective varies in the differ-

ent categories proposed above, it is clear that, taken as a whole, Péter
Forgács’s filmography offers a unique chronicle of twentieth-century his-
tory. With a few small exceptions, that chronicle is framed within the
period when small-gauge cameras were in widespread use, from the
1920s through the 1970s. The home movies filmed with these cameras do
not usually have much meaning for audiences outside the family circle,
who would be unfamiliar with most of the people and situations shown
in the films. To solve this problem, Forgács provides them with a specific
historical context, primarily through interviews with the now elderly
home moviemakers, or with other people featured in the footage, often
the moviemakers’ children. These interviews form an important part of
the historical research process, but they are not always included in the
films, particularly in his earliest productions, such as The Bartos Family,
Dusi & Jenő, and Free Fall. In later films they would appear more often,
always as a complement to the archival footage, which continued to serve
as the main visual component of the film, as can be seen in Miss Universe
1929, I Am Von Höfler, and Picturesque Epochs.
 70 P É TER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

Forgács’s films can be understood as a cinematic variant of a history

of the present, a characteristic feature of the microhistorical documenta-
ries analyzed in this book. The “present” in question is a period prior to
the immediate experience of the filmmaker, with the exception of the
documentaries about the communist era (Kádár’s Kiss, GermanUnity
@Balaton, and Class Lot), which deal with a period that Forgács, who was
born in 1950, experienced himself. This connection with the history of
the present is evident in the fact that Forgács’s historiographical enter-
prise is based on the memories of witnesses, which supply a key layer of
historical significance to the home movies shown. The domestic nature
of these archives clearly points to this historicization of experience which,
according to Julio Arostegui, characterizes the history of the present on
two levels that can be seen here: “the carryover of the private experiences
of individuals toward some kind of public experience” and the “cognitive
construction that enables us to analyze the present reality qua history,
allowing us to enrich our self-knowledge.”10 This self-knowledge is rela-
tive, as the witness’s testimony reaches us through the mediation of the
filmmaker, who is often not explicit about his dependence on those testi-
monies for his historical research of the archives. But even so, the pre-
eminence of home movies as mnemonic objects still points to a strong
presence of personal and family memory as a foundation for this histo-
riographical enterprise. This echoes Henry Rousso’s reflection on the
emergence of histories of the present in the last third of the twentieth
century, which he describes as “an age of memory,” with the result that
the “historians of the present time, somewhat more than others, have
been confronted with the uncontrolled deployment of that notion [mem-
ory], which ultimately subsumed all the other usual forms of relation to
the past—history, tradition, heritage, myth, legend.”11
However, this historiographical dimension of Forgács’s documenta-
ries differs from the conventional historian’s approach, since his films
are made with an explicitly auteurial perspective.12 The most character-
istic feature of his approach is unquestionably the habitual use of home
movies (and more occasionally amateur films) as visual sources. This
footage is sometimes complemented by public archives—both visual
(newsreels and other sources) and sound recordings (political speeches,
songs, and so on). Forgács creates his historical chronicles out of these
archival materials, giving them shape with the painstaking care of a
 P É T E R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE7 1

painter or a sculptor, which may be why he considers himself as much a

visual artist as a filmmaker. He is meticulous with his editing, combining
visual and sound sources and inserting captions that help to contextual-
ize the scenes. The visuals may also undergo different kinds of transfor-
mations: alteration of the projection speed, frequent use of freeze-frames
to single out the faces of the protagonists, use of tinting to identify where
the footage comes from, negative or mirror images inside the frame, split
screens with two or more visual sources, and so on. The soundtrack often
includes sound effects, although most prominent of all is the use of
experimental music. The scores for that music are generally composed by
Tibor Szemző, whose contributions Forgács has always considered essen-
tial to the creation of his films.
The overall effect clearly goes beyond a conventional historiographical
approach and is also quite distinct from the methods of the informative/
expository historical documentary, entering territory that evokes some
of the elements posited by Robert Rosenstone as postmodern history.
Forgács himself seems to point in this direction in at least four of the
seven “rules” that guide his filmmaking method, outlined in an inter-
view with Bill Nichols:

Second: find what is the magic of these unconscious home filmstrips,

the magic of re-contextualizing, layer after layer, feel the graphic of
each frame. . . .
Fourth: do not explain, or educate, but involve, engulf the viewer as
much possible.
Fifth: address the unconscious, the sensitive, unspeakable, touchable but
mostly silent part of the audience.
Sixth: let the music orchestrate and rule the emotional story.13

These rules underscore a recurring concern with constructing an experi-

ence that goes further than an “objectivist” transmission of historical
knowledge to offer an experience that appeals directly to the emotions of
the viewers, leaving room to explore what the film offers without guiding
them in a fixed direction, with a more open, less totalizing understand-
ing of history.
In this sense, Forgács could be described as an “artist-historian,”
adopting Miguel Ángel Hernández-Navarro’s term, inspired by Walter
 72 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

Benjamin.14 According to Hernández-Navarro, certain contemporary

artists reveal a decisive interest in exploring history, based mainly on two
strategies: 1) telling alternative, fictional, or speculative histories; and 2)
discovering parallel histories ignored by the grand narratives, as in the case
of Forgács.15 Indeed, there are a number of Benjaminian ideas explored
by Hernández-Navarro that resonate in Forgács’s work, in consonance
with some of the ideas outlined in chapter 1 related to the connections
between Walter Benjamin, everyday life studies, and microhistory.16 Ben-
jamin conceived of history as an open, incomplete time, active in the pres-
ent, constructed out of objects and images that acquire meaning through
a montage aimed at breaking the continuum of history to activate the
latent energy of the objects. Forgács’s work can be understood in this
way as well, as he works with forgotten home movies and amateur films
to rediscover their latent energy as mnemonic objects through his
meticulous postproduction work, using them to construct partial but
profoundly resonant historical narratives. Moreover, his work as an
“archaeologist”—a term that Forgács often uses to describe himself—
of home movie and amateur films has an obvious echo in the under-
standing that Benjamin had of the historian as a collector and ragpicker
(lumpensammler), someone who works with waste and refuse. In a way,
until recently (and in many cases still today) major film archives have
considered home movies practically to be “refuse,” material that they
would store reluctantly or would not consider a priority for cataloging.
Forgács’s work could thus be understood as a translation to film of that
Benjaminian ideal of the historian who collects this film refuse and uses
it to construct an alternative history of the twentieth century through
montage.
The main focus of this history of the twentieth century is Forgács’s
homeland, Hungary, but over the years he has expanded it to other Euro-
pean countries, with brief ventures into the Americas as well. In a chron-
ological order that is only approximate (because not all his films offer
exact dates for the footage they use), what follows is a brief outline of the
time frames and themes he has dealt with in his documentaries, to offer
a diachronic view of his work as an artist-historian.
The earliest period explored in a Forgács film can be found in Hunky
Blues, which is also his only film set in the United States.17 Hunky Blues
offers a collective portrait of Hungarians who immigrated to the United
 P É T E R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE73

States between 1890 and 1921, based on interviews with twenty-three

members or descendants of the immigrant families.18 To recreate the era
visually he makes use of family snapshots and archival footage of various
origins from the first decades of the twentieth century, which have no
direct relationship to the interview subjects. It could not have been oth-
erwise, as the film deals with a period prior to the development of 16mm
cameras, which first became commercially available in 1923, and even
then their high cost rendered them inaccessible to that first wave of immi-
grants. But Forgács is not explicit about the origin of these images, result-
ing in a certain ambiguity about their relationship to the stories told.
The 1930s constitute the main time frame for several of his films. With
footage from this period, Forgács constructs the thematic core of a num-
ber of the more biographical episodes in the Private Hungary series. This
is the case of The Bartos Family, Dusi & Jenő (both also using footage
from the 1940s and 1950s in their final sections), and The Notebook of a
Lady, whose archival footage covers events from 1933 to 1944 (juxtaposed
with contemporary scenes showing the elderly Baroness Jeszenszky
walking through the gardens of the palazzo where she once lived, now
shut down and in disrepair). Another biographical narrative from the
Private Hungary series, I Am Von Höfler, begins in 1928 and dedicates
much of its footage to those first decades, although it continues through
to the 1960s, including a contemporary interview with its now elderly
protagonist. A similar case is The Diary of Mr. N, two-thirds of which is
dedicated to the chronicle of this amateur filmmaker from 1938 to 1943,
with the final third continuing up to 1949 and a brief coda in 1967. And
outside this series, the film Miss Universe 1929 offers another biographi-
cal portrait, this time set in Austria, with a focus on the 1930s, although
it includes an epilogue in the 1970s and a contemporary interview with
the home moviemaker.
The 1930s are also the main temporal setting for El Perro Negro. The
film begins in 1929 with the first films made by the Salvans family, which
continue until 1936, when Joan Salvans was murdered. The first half of
the film focuses on this family in those years leading up to the Spanish
Civil War. The second half focuses on the years of the conflict (1936–1939)
using footage by Eduardo Noriega and other archival sources, thus
expanding the focus beyond these two filmmakers in an effort to explain
the complexity of the war.
 74 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

Partially overlapping with the years of the Spanish Civil War are other
documentaries that focus more on World War II and the Jewish Holo-
caust, which are perhaps Forgács’s best-known films internationally. Of
these, the one that begins at the earliest point in time is The Maelstrom,
which includes images of the Peereboom family as early as 1933 and ends
in 1942 or 1943 with their deportation to Auschwitz. Free Fall covers a
similar but rather shorter period, from 1937 to 1944. The journey of the
Slovak Jews to Palestine shown in The Danube Exodus took place in 1939,
while the second part of the film, the journey of German residents in
Bessarabia to the Third Reich, took place in 1940. Angelos’ Film, which is
set in Greece, also covers the years of the war, with a brief prologue set in
the years before it. And as its title suggests, Meanwhile Somewhere . . .
1940–1943, constructs a collective portrait of the middle years of World
War II in Europe. Finally, another episode in the Private Hungary series,
Land of Nothing, begins with a fifteen-minute prologue presenting the
everyday life of László Rátz before he was recruited, and then focuses on
two years of the war (1942–1943) based on footage filmed by Rátz while he
was a soldier in the Hungarian army.
Set in the years after World War II are four films that show different
aspects of life and history in communist Europe using the home movies
and amateur films made by their protagonists. Class Lot continues where
Free Fall leaves off, presenting the life of György Pető and his wife Eva
from 1946 to 1968. Beginning in the 1960s is Kadar’s Kiss, a collective
portrait of Hungary whose found footage is explicitly dated from 1963 to
1971. GermanUnity@Balaton traces a period from the 1960s through to
the 1980s and is also set in Hungary, at one of its most popular tourist
sites, Lake Balaton, although its protagonists are German families from
East and West Germany who often used this vacation spot to get together.
Also set in these decades, although beginning in the 1950s, is the bio-
graphical portrait offered in Picturesque Epochs of two painters, Mária
Gánóczy and her husband, József Breznay, and their work in the context
of communist Hungary.
This brief overview offers an idea of the historical chronicle of the twen-
tieth century that Forgács has constructed over the course of his career,
focusing mainly on European countries and limited to the period when
small-gauge cameras were in common use. Having established the typol-
ogy of his filmography and its historical chronology, the following sections
 P É T E R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE75

present a close analysis of the three films that offer the most canonical
microhistorical perspective: The Maelstrom, Free Fall, and Class Lot.

THE MAELSTROM

In The Maelstrom (1997), Péter Forgács offers a microhistorical explora-

tion of the Shoah through the history of the Peereboom family. It could
be argued that this film brings together the most paradigmatic features
of Forgács’s filmography, while also being one of his most complete
microhistorical works, offering an original perspective in the extensive
filmography about the Holocaust.19 The extraordinary significance of the
Holocaust in contemporary culture may be one of the reasons why this is
also Forgács’s best-known film, leading many to associate his filmogra-
phy with the depiction of Jewish families persecuted by the Nazi regime.
But, in fact, only four of his films explore such stories as their main
focus—The Bartos Family, Free Fall, The Danube Exodus, and The
Maelstrom—although they also appear more incidentally in Miss Uni-
verse and I Am Von Höfler.
The Peereboom home movie collection contains more than four hours
of footage shot between 1933 and 1942 (most of it filmed by Max Peere-
boom), of which Forgács uses thirty-eight minutes. In the other twenty-
one minutes of his film, the most important footage comes from the
home movies of the family of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian who
was appointed Reich commissioner for the Occupied Dutch Territories.
A few scenes of Dutch Nazis are also included in the film, as well as foot-
age of a Jewish family being forced from their home, images of rough
waves crashing against a port (which open the film and justify its title),
and six photographs of the Peerebooms. For the soundtrack, Forgács
uses the characteristic music of Tibor Szemző, occasionally punctuated
by sound effects synchronized with the image. He also inserts public
sound recordings on seven occasions: four excerpts from radio broad-
casts and three from public speeches (one by the queen of the Nether-
lands from London and two by Seyss-Inquart).
With these elements, Forgács weaves together a chronicle that Michael
Renov describes as being positioned on “the dynamic border between
 76 P É TER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

testimonial transcription and aesthetic construction,” leading him to

characterize Forgács as “at once scribe, witness and poet.”20 Indeed,
Forgács makes a film based on an archive that covers a family history cut
short by the Nazi persecution, but developed from an auteurial perspec-
tive that turns this microhistorical chronicle into a truly moving repre-
sentation of the Shoah. It is precisely its quality as representative of the
Holocaust that gives this documentary its main force, revealing how micro-
history can contribute a perspective to our understanding of history by
virtue of its reduced scale of observation. In this sense, The Maelstrom
serves as a highly successful example of a historical “fractal,” returning
to the interesting analogy posited by Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and Ist-
ván Szíjártó mentioned in chapter 1.21 The film could be explained as a
fractal of the Shoah insofar as the experience of the Peereboom family—
which constitutes its basic structure—was repeated in many other Jewish
families, and therefore provides a general understanding of the Shoah.
In addition to the change of scale it offers, it focuses on “the proper
name” (i.e., a specific individual) as a guiding thread for historiographi-
cal research, just as Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni propose, associated
with strata of society that do not play a central role in public life.22 It also
gives priority to human agency, conveyed through a narrative-type
structure, as a means of access to historical knowledge, which is charac-
teristic of a microhistorical approach.
Forgács constructs this narrative structure with an approach that in
some ways resembles a suspense story, gradually introducing the threat
that looms over the featured family, until we come to the tragic ending in
the final scene. The first part of the documentary (up to 35’ [minute
thirty-five]) basically focuses on a family chronicle of the Peerebooms
from 1933 to 1940. It begins with the parents’ silver wedding anniversary,
then moves on to vacations on the beach, the in-laws opening a new
store, other scenes of outings, Max and Annie’s wedding, more vaca-
tions, the couple’s first child, and the whole family on a trip to Paris. This
part of the film also includes scenes of public life filmed by Max, such as
Queen Wilhelmina and Princess Juliana’s visit, or Juliana’s marriage
(footage of the princess passing by in her carriage after the wedding).
In this first part of the film, Forgács begins to insert a few visual and
sound archival documents related to the Nazi movement, positing a con-
trast with the Peereboom home movies that increases gradually as the
 P É T E R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE77

film progresses. Early on in the film he shows scenes from Annie’s sports
club, while we hear a voice-over of a radio broadcast announcing the
Dutch athlete Tinus Osendarp winning the bronze medal at the 1936
Olympic Games (11’). Although this news seems to be included here
for its thematic coincidence, Osendarp subsequently became a promi-
nent member of the Dutch Nazi Party and of the SS. Almost immediately
after this comes the first scene of footage not related to the Peere-
booms, showing activities at a youth camp run by the Dutch Nazi Move-
ment (NSB). Forgács underscores the change visually by giving it a blue
tint, which he uses in all the other scenes associated with Nazism, in
contrast to the sepia tone of the Peereboom footage.23 Later, he creates
the first explicit clash between the microhistorical context of the Jewish
family and the macrohistorical context of the Nazi regime when images
of Max involved in some Red Cross exercises are accompanied by a
speech by Seyss-Inquart welcoming Hitler to Vienna (26’).24 Shortly after
this, a caption informs us of the German invasion of Poland (33’), fol-
lowed moments later by an elaborate sequence masterfully signaling the
turning point in the documentary (35’): Max and Annie are walking
through a park with their daughter Flora in a baby carriage; in a voice-
over we begin to hear a Nazi meeting and the German national anthem
of that era, while the image—with the baby carriage—changes from
sepia to blue and a caption announces the German invasion of the Neth-
erlands in 1940 (see figure 3.1). The scene ends with footage in color of
Seyss-Inquart and his family at their new Dutch residence, the Clingen-
dael Estate.
The threat is already obvious to the viewer, who will experience the
twenty-five minutes that follow with increasing anxiety as the two worlds
seem to run parallel to each other, when in reality they are headed for a
collision that will be fatal for the Jewish family. In this second part of the
film, Forgács continues to weave together an ever-thicker web of clashes
that gradually cast the dark shadow of persecution imposed by the Nazi
regime in the Netherlands over the microhistorical narrative of the Peere-
booms. To do this, he incorporates the reading or the recitative chanting
in Dutch of the anti-Jewish laws enacted by Seyss-Inquart (with captions
in English summarizing their content) as a key narrative/rhetorical ele-
ment. The first law mentioned refers to animal sacrifices, regulating the
use of anesthetic to minimize their suffering (37’). Meanwhile, on screen
 78 P É TER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

FIGURE 3.1 The Maelstrom. The stroller for Flora, the Peerebooms’ daughter.

we see images of Max and Annie’s little girl in a park, creating a cutting
paradox that raises the specter of the dark future that awaits this baby.
The first explicitly anti-Jewish law, which defines who is Jewish, is
announced moments later (39’) over amateur footage showing scenes of
a Dutch Nazi Party (NSB) training camp, presenting the threat against
the Jewish community more explicitly. Later we hear laws related to the
economic assets of Jewish people (44’), the ban on going out in public (50’),
the requirement to wear a Star of David (54’), and finally the order
declaring what they could take to a “work camp” in Germany (56–58’).
We generally hear these laws while the Peerebooms’ home movies are on
screen, creating a specific resonance with the everyday lives of this Jew-
ish family. In this way, what would otherwise be mundane scenes, such
as the shot of children playing in the small yard of a house under the
smiling gaze of their elders (50’), acquire a new meaning when a caption
tells us that Jews have been banned from going out in public.
 P É T ER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE79

Forgács also creates visual associations between the world of the Jew-
ish family and the world of the Nazis, in a complex orchestration that
combines parallels and contrasts in this second part of the film. The par-
allels are obvious enough with the introduction of footage of family
scenes of the Seyss-Inquarts, which are juxtaposed with the footage of
the Peerebooms. The clearest sequence in this sense (48’–50’) is the one
that shows Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s daughter and her husband feeding
their little girl, followed by Max and Annie coming out of the hospital
with Jacques Franklin, their newborn second child, which in turn is fol-
lowed by some scenes of the Nazi leader playing with his little grand-
daughter. Forgács underscores the parallels between these two worlds on
at least two other occasions: when he shows Annie and other people
skating in winter in Vlissingen, followed by a scene of the Seyss-Inquart
family skating at the Clingendael Estate (43’); and when he juxtaposes a
scene of men at an NSB training camp bathing in a river with an image
of Annie bathing at the beach (38’). The intimate or everyday quality of
these scenes, reinforced by the innocence conveyed by the children of
both families, opens a space for a more complex reading of reality, as it
presents the human face of the Nazi leaders. Such a depiction inevitably
calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s reference to the banality of evil in her
book Eichmann in Jerusalem, not only in the more direct formulation
applied by Arendt to Adolf Eichmann, but also more indirectly in the
sense that the Seyss-Inquarts’ home movies provide privileged access to
their family intimacy, showing that “normal,” home-loving people were
capable of carrying out the Jewish genocide.25
The contrasts between the two worlds are repeatedly underscored
throughout this second part of the film, bringing the persecution of the
Jewish community increasingly into the foreground. Not long after
Seyss-Inquart is shown as a loving family man, we hear a speech of his in
which he makes his anti-Semitic stance explicit, over images of him and
his family playing at his Dutch residence (again linking the micro- and
macrohistorical dimensions). Shortly afterward, we are informed of the
first impact of the anti-Semitic persecution on the Peerebooms: Max’s
brothers Nico and Louis are arrested in 1941 in the Koot raids (45’).
Forgács presents this—in the only internal flashback in the narrative—
with images from home movies already shown earlier of vacations on the
beach where both of them can be seen. A little later, after we have been
 8 0 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

informed of the transfer of all Jews—including the Peerebooms—to

Amsterdam, a caption tells us of the deaths of Nico and Louis in Mau-
thausen. Then, Forgács again contrasts the private register (with Annie
feeding her child and putting him to bed) with the anti-Semitic public
discourse, this time through an interview with an SS doctor about “eth-
nic cleansing.”
The final scene is drawing near. But first there is a sequence show-
ing SS Reichsführer Himmler’s visit to the Clingendael Estate (53’–55’).
The main part of this sequence shows Himmler and Seyss-Inquart
playing in a doubles tennis match. Here we get a glimpse of something
that was already evident in the previous Seyss-Inquart footage: its
ambiguous nature as home movie footage. Its subject matter is typical
of this type of filmmaking: private family moments or leisure activi-
ties like horse riding or playing tennis. But their behavior in front of
the camera often looks forced, as if they were being filmed by someone
outside the family or as if they had expected that these films would
end up being shown outside the family environment. As Ernst Van
Alphen suggests, the Seyss-Inquarts know they are part of history as
representatives of the Nazi regime, and this means their home movies
can be interpreted more as part of a historical time than the personal
time normally associated with this type of footage.26 In other words,
the microhistorical dimension that characterizes home movies begins
to blur here, placing the footage on a hazy frontier between micro-
and macrohistory, paradigmatically represented in this tennis match
between two prominent leaders of the regime during the Nazi occupa-
tion of the Netherlands.
After a few brief images of Jews in the Amsterdam ghetto, we now
come to the final sequence (56’–59’), perhaps the most widely discussed
in Forgács’s filmography, due to its metonymic power as a representation
of the Shoah from a microhistorical perspective: Max, Annie, and her step-
mother together in a living room, smiling, drinking coffee, and arranging
clothing, with Max and Annie’s two children playing next to them, in an
innocent scene with no apparent special meaning (see figure 3.2). But
the unsettling music of Tibor Szemző and the cold voice-over narra-
tion explaining what every Jewish family can take to a “work camp” (sum-
marized in captions in English) produce a clear dissonance with the
image. This serves to convey the clash with the original meaning that the
 P É TER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE81

FIGURE 3.2 The Maelstrom. The Peereboom family, preparing for their forced depar-
ture to a “work camp” in Germany.

Peerebooms had intended for these images, in an interesting variant of

the second type of appropriation of home movies discussed in chapter 2.
Forgács underscores this dissonance, to the point of openly contradict-
ing the apparently happy and ordinary meaning of the home movie, with
three consecutive captions that provide the macrohistorical context. The
first expresses the point of view of the Peerebooms themselves, and
partly explains why they look so relaxed: “Preparation by Max, Annie
and her stepmother for their departure for work camp in Germany.” The
second relates to the point of view of the spectator, who knows the true
nature of the journey they are about to take: “4 September 1942, Franklin,
Flora, Max, Annie, and her stepmother are deported to Auschwitz.” And
the third informs us indirectly of their death with the statement, appear-
ing over a picture of Max’s brother Simon and his newlywed wife, that he
was the family’s only survivor (a caption that thus also reveals who has
 8 2 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

been the main source of information for this reconstruction of the Peere-
booms’ history).
The scene possesses a powerful emotional charge that deeply affects
the viewer, as this is no impersonal narration of the Holocaust but the
death of a “familiar” family, of people with whom we have shared
moments of leisure and celebration, and who are now innocent victims
of the machinery of genocide. The evidentiary force of home movies con-
stitutes the basis of this striking effect on the viewer, as we are compelled
to recognize that what we are watching is not fiction, but the real death of
innocent people. At the same time, this impact is intensified by the pow-
erlessness we feel in our situation as spectators, knowing the tragedy
looming over the Peerebooms in the present of their home movies, but
being unable to help them from our position in the contemporary pres-
ent. Forgács explains it insightfully when he describes this distance as
the force behind the film’s dramatic tension: “The time lapse between
today—the viewing time—and the past—the film-event time (historic
time)—this distance is full of tension. The bridging of two dates . . . is a
strong effect, because . . . we are aware of the would-be victims’ future,
but not able to communicate our knowledge.”27
This temporal tension is effectively constructed through the combi-
nation of the informative and affective elements of the archival images:
we know the fate of a Jewish family under the Nazi regime, but it is an
affective knowledge that makes us suffer with them right up to the
impact of the final scene. This tension constitutes an eloquent expres-
sion of the distinction that French theorist Roland Barthes makes
between studium and punctum in his study of photography. In con-
trast to the informational aspects provided by any photograph (which
he labels studium), Barthes posits the presence of other elements that
leave a deeper impression because of their emotional impact (punc-
tum). He also identifies a type of punctum that is of special relevance
to this case, based on the temporal distance between the present of the
archival image and the present of the viewer: “This new punctum,
which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating
emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’).”28 To explain his idea, Barthes
analyzes a photograph of a convicted murderer about to be executed,
taken in 1865:
 P É T ER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE83

The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the
punctum is: he is going to die. . . . I observe with horror an anterior future
of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose
(aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is
the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my
mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winn-
icott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred.29

The Peerebooms’ home movie footage, especially this final scene show-
ing them in their living room, constitutes one of the most disturbing
examples of this punctum that can make us shudder, showing us in their
present an innocent family that we know is going to die in their near
future. This is why The Maelstrom is so persuasive and why its microhis-
torical portrait of the Shoah may help us to understand the magnitude of
this genocide more deeply than an exhaustive study in the tradition of
conventional history.

FR EE FALL A N D CLASS LOT

Péter Forgács adopts a similar approach in Free Fall (1996), which con-
sists largely of footage filmed by the Hungarian Jew György Pető from
1937 to 1944. However, this time his protagonist survived the Holocaust
and continued shooting home movies from 1946 to 1968—footage that
Forgács used to make Class Lot (1997). These two films can therefore be
analyzed together, as a microhistorical chronicle of Hungary over four
decades that were marked by enormous historical changes, with World
War II, the alliance with Nazi Germany, and the subsequent communist
regime.
The long period covered by György Pető’s home movies brings these
two films close to what could be categorized as a biography of this Hun-
garian family, raising the question of the similarities or differences
between microhistorical and biographical approaches. Jill Lepore
addresses this question with an insightful description of the differences
between the two, identifying the following as the most significant: “If
 8 4 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and signifi-

cance of an individual’s life and his contribution to history, microhistory
is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a
person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness,
but in its exemplariness.”30 This connects with the concept of the fractal
discussed above and can be seen clearly in the history of the Peerebooms
told in The Maelstrom and now in the history of the Petős told in Free
Fall and Class Lot. This exemplariness is not incompatible with the fact
that, here again, the individual proper name is a guiding thread of the
historical research, resulting in the kind of prosopography from below
advocated by microhistorians. Forgács himself rejects the classification
of these films as biographies, asserting that his work based on home
movies “is closer to archaeology than to an actual biography.”31 Defining
himself as archaeologist, Forgács seeks to place the emphasis on the frag-
mentary and incomplete nature of these home movies, and the laborious
task of recontextualization required to render them historiographically
meaningful. This is a task in some ways similar to the one taken on by
microhistorians, with their exploration of fragmentary sources that neces-
sitates the activation of the evidential paradigm posited by Ginzburg.
As in The Maelstrom, Free Fall and Class Lot underscore the impor-
tance of everyday life as a historiographical category, using György Pető’s
family history to offer an alternative account to the public history of a
particularly troubled period for contemporary Hungary. However,
Forgács does not ignore the public history, which he shows through
newsreels from the era, political speeches, voiceover narration, and so
on. The end result is a masterful balance between the different scales of
observation while still keeping the main focus on the microhistorical
scale. These questions are analyzed below, considering each film indi-
vidually in order to identify the nuances that Forgács introduces in his
exploration of the different periods they cover: the Horthy regime and its
increasing ties to Nazism in Free Fall, and the communist regime in
Class Lot.
Of the two films, Free Fall is the one with more similarities to The
Maelstrom, as it covers a similar historical period, also uses home movies
as visual source, and has the persecution of Jews and the Shoah as its
main theme. However, there are also some significant differences. In Free
 P É TE R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE85

Fall, Forgács introduces more explanations of the macrohistorical con-

text, largely due to the need to provide viewers with a basic knowledge of
Hungarian history, something that was hardly necessary in The Mael-
strom. The other most notable difference is the way he conveys the impact
of the Shoah on the Jewish families featured in the film. With the Peere-
booms, the viewer learns of the death of Louis and Nico quite late in the
film, and no information is provided on the fate of the rest of the family
until the end. In the case of the Petős, over the course of the second part
of the film—through captions and in most cases without a narrative jus-
tification other than their appearance in a home movie—the fate of fam-
ily members and friends is gradually revealed. In narratological terms,
this weakens the suspense effect and the consequent emotional tension
that Forgács achieved in The Maelstrom.32 Although the habitual use of
home movies might suggest that the story is conveyed to the spectator
through an internal focalization (the featured families), the tone in The
Maelstrom is actually marked by the fact that the viewer has extratextual
knowledge that the protagonists do not, creating a tension between our
identification with the Peerebooms (internal focalization) and our supe-
rior extratextual knowledge, closer to the absence of focalization. In Free
Fall, however, the story moves further away from an internal focaliza-
tion, as it foreshadows the final fate of most of the protagonists (in many
cases, their death in concentration camps) from minute 33 right through
to the end of the film, in minute 72. This somehow defuses the vicarious
identification that the spectator might otherwise feel with the Petős, with
the exception of György and his wife, Eva, whose survival is revealed
only in the final minute of the film. The overall tone therefore tends toward
an absence of focalization, further accentuated by the greater presence of
sequences of macrohistorical contextualization and the sporadic appear-
ance of a voice-over narration with an omniscient character.
Through this narrative approach, Forgács offers a complex articula-
tion of the macro- and microhistorical dimensions, giving Free Fall a
distinctive profile in its historical portrait of the era. The film begins by
introducing György Pető, in a kind of prologue that runs for around five
minutes, recounting that he lived in Szeged, that he studied music and
accompanied the singing and dancing Rosner Sisters on their tours in
the 1930s, that in 1936 he inherited his father’s lottery shop, and that in
 8 6 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

1937 he bought an 8 mm camera. We are then introduced to his family,

through home movies of family gatherings: his brother, Lacy; his sister,
Rózsi, and her husband, Lázsló (a lieutenant in the army and not Jewish),
and so on. After this prologue, now in the year 1938, Forgács begins
providing information on the macrohistorical context of both the differ-
ent anti-Jewish laws that were being enacted at that time and the main
developments in Hungarian history in those years. In the 1930s Miklos
Horthy’s government gradually began forming closer ties with the Nazi
regime, until it finally joined the Axis powers in 1940. Prior to this, Ger-
many had helped Hungary regain part of the territory it had lost after
World War I, thanks to the First and Second Vienna Awards (1938 and
1940). In 1941 Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union to support the
German invasion, but after their resounding defeat by the Soviet army at
the Don River in 1943, they were no longer active in this front and even
began secret negotiations with the Allies. Germany ended up imposing a
“friendly” occupation of Hungary in March 1944. In October they
installed a puppet government, which would last until Soviet troops
invaded the country and brought an end to the Nazi occupation in
April 1945. The film’s audience is informed of the basic elements of these
historical developments through captions and public archives (film and
sound), with one important exception: the occupation of Košice (Kassa
in Hungarian), located in southern Slovakia, in November 1938, as a con-
sequence of the First Vienna Award (10’–12’). This event is shown through
footage filmed by György Pető—with a recording of the radio broadcast
by a BBC correspondent supportive of the annexation added by
Forgács—in a fragment that includes intertitles made by Pető himself,
suggesting a production more typical of an amateur filmmaker than a
home moviemaker. Alongside this political context, Free Fall also traces
the evolution of the increasing persecution of the Jewish community in
the country as it breaks into the happy everyday world of the Petős.33
This persecution was expressed in various laws enacted in and after 1938,
but always stopping short of collaboration with the Nazi machinery of
extermination, until the German occupation of 1944, when, in just two
months, with the collaboration of the new government, around 450,000
Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where nearly all would die.
Once again Forgács effectively articulates the microhistorical chronicle—
in this case woven together using György Pető’s home movies—with the
 P É T E R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE87

macrohistorical context of the era, in another example of a historical

fractal that helps explain the history of Hungary in relation to World
War II and the Shoah from an original perspective. Unlike The Mael-
strom, in this film the Hungarian filmmaker presents the contrast
between scales of observation very early on. As early as minute 5, a cap-
tion announces the first anti-Jewish law, which is also heard in a recitative
chanting in Hungarian, followed by or overlapping with an English trans-
lation in a voice-over, a strategy that is repeated over the course of the
film to inform us of the anti-Jewish legislation.34 Later on, György Pető’s
own footage displays this intersection of historiographical scales when
he starts working for the Jewish Labor Service in 1940. The Labor Service
was created as an alternative for certain communities, including Jews,
who were considered by the Hungarian government to be too “unreli-
able” to serve in the army. In 1940–1941 Jewish Labor servicemen were
predominantly involved in building roads or performing earthworks
under relatively normal conditions. But the situation worsened when
they were sent to the Russian front in 1941, and it continued to deterio-
rate right up to the end of the war, resulting in the death of many Jews
due either to inhumane working conditions or to the open hostility of
their supervisors. The image that Free Fall gives of the Labor Service,
however, provided by footage filmed by György himself in 1940 and 1941,
is one of friendly interactions with their bosses and apparently light
workloads, with a surprisingly jovial tone. These scenes are actually
introduced for the first time (31’) in a sequence including their own cap-
tions (in Hungarian), beginning with two introductory titles: “Souvenirs
of a shoveler,” followed by “Some merry moments from the life of the
Jewish labor company at Kiszombor.” Like the sequence of the occupa-
tion of Košice, this footage was subject to some postproduction work,
again placing it on the boundary between home movie and amateur film.
However, when György is sent to the Labor Service again in 1942, but this
time to the Russian front, he does not take his camera, and we are
informed of his departure and his fortuitous survival through captions
alone; this is also the case when he is recruited for the Russian front
again in 1944.
As noted above, around halfway through the film, Forgács also begins
to include news of the ultimate fate of György Pető’s family and friends,
with no specific intradiegetic motivation. The first of these refers to his
 8 8 P É TER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

friend Bandi Karos, who is shown in the footage of the labor camp, over
which a caption appears stating that he was shot to death four years later.
This dissonance becomes even more intense when the information pro-
vided by the captions contrasts against the happy, ordinary present of
the home movies, for example, when we see Eva’s mother smiling at the
meal where the two families are celebrating György and Eva’s engage-
ment (46’), while a caption informs us that she died in the Neukirchen
camp in 1944. Similar situations are used to tell us of the death or depor-
tation of other friends and relatives, of which the most painful are those
related to the children. For example, we see Lacy Pető’s young son Janika
at bedtime, while a caption informs us that he died when Budapest was
bombed in 1944. Shortly after this we are shown György and Eva’s new-
born son, Andris, in October 1943, beginning a six-minute section focus-
ing on him (62’–68’), which also includes some brief references to public
history. The most shocking part of this sequence is a caption telling of
the baby’s death—a few months later in Neukirchen, in 1944—almost
immediately after he was introduced, leaving barely enough time to
empathize with his innocent gaze, although we will continue to see home
movies of him for several minutes longer (see figure 3.3). Free Fall ends
with a section for which Forgács no longer uses György’s footage (68’–73’);
it has the tone of an epilogue and serves mainly to recount the deporta-
tion of the Hungarian Jews, with specific information about the Pető
family. This section concludes with images of a forest and a caption stat-
ing that Eva survived the concentration camp, György returned from
Soviet captivity, and they had a daughter after the war.
In short, Free Fall is a film very close in formal terms to The Mael-
strom, as can be seen from its use of home movies and the evocative music
of Tibor Szemző, and with a similar microhistorical approach, based on
the Pető family archive. Forgács takes on the challenge of constructing
this microhistorical narrative while framing it within the complex mac-
rohistorical context of the era, a feat that he achieves with the different
layers provided by the archival footage, the soundtrack, and the textual
information of the captions.
Class Lot is explicitly presented as a continuation of Free Fall right
from its first scene, which features the baby who appeared at the end of
the previous film, Kati, born in November 1946. With a similar approach,
Forgács now constructs a microhistorical narrative of Hungary from
 PÉTER FORGÁCS’S HOME MOVIE CHRONICLE89

FIGURE 3.3 Free Fall. Andris, the Petős’ newborn son.

1946 to 1968, while following the life of György, Eva, and their daughter,
Kati. The archive on which this film is based is again the family’s home
movies, which are generally presented in a sepia tone. However, the film
also contains elements that differentiate it from the previous pictures: in
narrative terms, it features a more explicit internal focalization on the
daughter, with various flashbacks that connect it with Free Fall, and the
presence on a few occasions of an omniscient narrator; it also posits a
more explicit overlap of macro- and microhistorical scales; and, visually,
it frequently makes use of different combinations, such as split screens,
superimposed images, or inserted images (framed in various ways).
Forgács makes use of an omniscient narrator in certain parts of the
film, such as in the first few minutes, in order to provide a brief outline of
György Pető’s life, or to explain the family’s move to Budapest. However,
the film tends toward an internal focalization through the daughter,
Kati, who to a large extent is the story’s guiding thread for two reasons.
The first is consistent with the type of archive used, home movies, which
 9 0 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

follow the daughter’s growth, from infancy until she starts college. In
addition, Forgács reinforces this internal focalization by including an
interview with Kati at different points (a strategy that was not used in
any of his previous films), which often turns her into the narrator or
commentator of the different historical situations of her family. Never-
theless, the Hungarian filmmaker seems to resist breaking the stylistic
unity provided by home movies as the film’s visual source, relegating the
interviewee to the top right corner of the frame, an unusual choice for a
documentary but effective in this film.
The other characteristic narrative element of Class Lot is the use of
flashbacks, establishing a dialogue with the family’s past through the
insertion of older home movies (most of which were already included in
Free Fall). On two occasions (37’ and 40’), the film briefly recalls the his-
tory of the family’s suffering as victims of the Holocaust—through cap-
tions, photographs, and home movies—although it does so while main-
taining the internal focalization, as it tells this history to explain that
Kati found out about those past events in her preteen years. The second
occasion could be described as more chilling, because Forgács shows
Kati as a baby, in 1946, and then inserts an image of her brother, Andris,
in 1943, also a newborn, in his first mention in this film (40’). A caption
states that he died when he was one year old in the Neukirchen camp,
which, combined with Szemző’s unsettling music, vests this scene with a
special emotional resonance, particularly for viewers who have not seen
Free Fall. A similar strategy of juxtaposing time frames reappears on
four other occasions in the final part of the film to show the family in
different periods sharing the same frame: the mother, Eva, in 1940 and
1968; the daughter, Kati, in 1948 and 1968; and the father, György, in 1941
and 1965, and, later, in 1908 (photograph), 1939, and 1968, which is the last
year of the Petős’ footage. With this strategy, rarely used before in his
filmography, Forgács thus looks back on the past images of this family
archive.35 This serves to link Free Fall and Class Lot together as parts of
the same life journey, thereby underscoring the passage of time and the
ability of film to preserve that fleeting past, evoking André Bazin’s pow-
erful metaphor of cinema as the mummification of change.36
The microhistorical perspective that dominates Class Lot is now
more deeply intertwined with the macrohistorical context, which is
visible mainly through the frequent insertion of newsreels made by the
 P É T E R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE91

communist regime and captions related to the main events and figures of
the period. After the Soviet occupation of Hungary, there was a period of
transition during which a democratic system was permitted; but since
the pro-Soviet parties received only limited support in the two elections
held in those years, starting in 1947 the Moscow-backed government
began taking over key positions, restricting freedoms, and persecuting
opposition leaders, until finally Hungary became a communist regime in
1949. This evolution of the macrohistorical context is not detailed in the
documentary, although certain elements are included that suggest or fill
in this information. For example, at the beginning of the film (6’) we are
shown a fashion parade held in the fall-winter season of 1947–1948, fol-
lowed by an advertisement for cigarettes, both of which clearly predate
the official communist regime. The communist leaders are also presented
in various contexts. In the beginning (3’) we see the communist leader of
the postwar period, Mátyás Rákosi, followed by one of his lieutenants,
Ernő Gerő, giving a political speech. Later on (18’), we see Imre Nagy,
then prime minister, announcing the death of Stalin in 1953, and shortly
after that (23’) we are introduced to János Kádár, who is explicitly identi-
fied as “communist chief” from 1956 to 1988 (see figure 3.4). Also appear-
ing is Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, giving a speech in another visual
insert later in the film (36’). What is interesting about these images is
that, with the exception of Gerő’s speech, Forgács introduces them all as
small visual inserts over the Petős’ home movies. The clash between
macro- and microhistorical scales thus becomes more explicit, also
pointing to the resistance of everyday life to political and social systems,
a tension that is more pronounced here because the system in question is
a totalitarian regime. The theories of Michel de Certeau come to mind
again here, and Ben Highmore contextualizes them in a way that seems
to highlight the connections with this film’s microhistorical exploration
more clearly: “The cultures of everyday life are therefore submerged
below the level of a social and textual authority. While they tend to
remain invisible and unrepresentable, they perform something like a
guerrilla war on these authorities. . . . This position offers a valuable
‘view from below,’ and productively foregrounds a range of practical
forms of ‘resistance’ within everyday life.”37
Forgács’s work also reflects this dialectic between the communist
political system and everyday life in other scenes where the combination
 92 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

FIGURE 3.4 Class Lot. Summer vacationers at Lake Balaton juxtaposed with Janós
Kádár, general secretary of communist Hungary.

of visuals and soundtrack create resonances that amplify the resistant

quality of the everyday, often with a touch of parody or irony. An early
example of this is found when the home movie footage of the Petős’ lot-
tery shop (4’) is shown, accompanied by a communist song, which could
be interpreted as a threat that would be realized later, when the regime
expropriates the business. Another curious scene (11’), perhaps taking
the parody slightly overboard, is the one showing a female singer at an
official ceremony performing a propagandistic song, with superimposed
images of little Kati in home movies filmed by her father. Another con-
trast with a clearly ironic intention is the sequence showing an official
newsreel about the country’s agriculture with superimposed images of
family vacations: at the lake, by the pool, or traveling by train (24’–26’).
The soundtrack reinforces the ironic contrast, as the newsreel announc-
er’s words clash not only with the images, but also with Szemző’s music,
which in this sequence becomes dynamic and upbeat, in keeping with
 P É T ER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE93

the Petős’ home movies. The same type of music is used in another scene
(34’–35’), where the clash of scales acquires one of its most effective
expressions in the film: inserted over images in color of Kati playing with
a Hula-Hoop is a newsreel of the official May Day parade of 1957 (see
figure 3.5). The ambient sound of the parade and the narrator’s commen-
tary compete with Szemző’s music on the soundtrack, while Forgács
emphasizes the young communists’ loyal dedication to the party with
the caption: “Eternal allegiance!” The image of Kati, engrossed in her
control of the Hula-Hoop, thus acquires a metonymic dimension of
unquestionable rhetorical power, as an image of the microhistorical
resistance against the communist regime.
Class Lot includes many other references to this contrast between
scales of observation, with the inclusion of official newsreels on several
occasions and references to the popular culture of the era, often linked to
György Pető’s work as a musician in an operetta company. Overall, the

FIGURE 3.5 Class Lot. Kati, the Petős’ daughter, juxtaposed with young people march-
ing on May Day.
 9 4 P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

contrasts and combinations of scales presented by Forgács in this film

can be said to offer a clear example of the value of a microhistorical per-
spective, in that it provides a different kind of access to contemporary
Hungarian history, offering a view that nuances and complements the
official and critical discourses on Europe’s communist regimes of the last
century.
Through a close analysis of The Maelstrom, Free Fall, and Class Lot,
this chapter has offered a study of a filmography that is truly unique for
its systematic use of home movies (and to a lesser extent, amateur films)
as the main visual archive for a series of historical chronicles. While a
diverse range of approaches can be identified in the films of Péter
Forgács, as has been made clear by the typology proposed above, it is
undeniable that many of his films are imbued with a microhistorical sen-
sibility, which has given rise to some of the best examples of the micro-
historical documentary form. His films effectively show how a filmmaker
can undertake significant historiographical investigations through a cre-
ative process that, without abandoning the historian’s rigor, offers an
emotional understanding that can open up new pathways in historical
research.
 4
THE INCARCERATION OF JAPANESE
AMERICANS DURING WORLD WAR II

Something Strong Within, A Family Gathering,

From a Silk Cocoon, and History and Memory

D
uring World War II, after declaring war on Japan in 1942, Wash-
ington took steps to intern the entire population of Japanese
ancestry living on the West Coast of the United States in differ-
ent camps in remote locations, for fear of the possibility of their collabo-
ration with the enemy. Around 120,000 people were thus subjected to
incarceration. Worse still, it was not only first-generation immigrants
(Issei) who were affected; nearly two-thirds of those incarcerated
belonged to the second generation (Nisei), who had been born in the
country and therefore had full rights as U.S. citizens. This controversial
decision was accepted by the general public without much protest, due
not only to war anxiety but also to the increasing prejudices aroused by
the steady growth of the Japanese immigrant population on the West
Coast since the mid-nineteenth century. Their forced incarceration in
concentration camps,1 which lasted in most cases until the end of the war
in 1945, provoked a profound identity crisis for Japanese Americans, as
they were stripped of their property (which they were forced to sell off at
a loss) and automatically became suspects (and de facto prisoners) on the
sole basis of their ethnic background, a fate that most Americans of Ger-
man or Italian descent did not have to suffer. After their release, few
returned to where they had been living before, and the years of intern-
ment were often left out of family narratives, repressed like a nightmare
that nobody wished to remember. In the 1970s, the third generation (the
 9 6  IN C A RC ERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E R I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

Sansei, children and grandchildren of the victims of incarceration)

launched a campaign for redress, culminating with the enactment of the
Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which apologized for the internment, admit-
ting that it was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of
political leadership.” At the same time, beginning in the 1970s, and espe-
cially since the 1980s, there has been an abundance of historical studies,
literary works, and films about these events.
Numerous short and feature-length documentaries have been made
examining this period of history.2 These documentaries can be consid-
ered from various perspectives: on the one hand, they refer to issues of
representation of transnational and biracial ethnic minorities, a topic
that has been analyzed extensively, including in studies related specifi-
cally to Asian Americans and Japanese Americans. On the other hand,
since these are often histories with which the filmmakers themselves
have a personal connection, these films can also be analyzed from the
perspective of autobiographical studies, a field in which the stories of
ethnic minorities have offered valuable insights into the history and
culture of their time, as Betty Ann Bergland observes: “Because ethnic
autobiographies point to the multicultural complexity of the United States,
they illuminate the richness and complexity of that culture—the trage-
dies and injustices as well as the resistance and resilience of its people.”3
Without ignoring this diversity of perspectives, I focus here on these
films as history, on the historiographical perspective they offer, with par-
ticular attention to those that best reflect a microhistorical approach. A
common element that all these films share is their deconstruction of the
official narrative that was used to justify the mass internment. They thus
posit a countermemory to the official narrative of the era, focusing—as
George Lipsitz proposes with reference to a broader context in Time
Passages—“on localized experiences with oppression, using them to
reframe and refocus dominant narratives.” 4 Jun Xing expands on this
idea in her study of documentaries made by Asian American women
about these events: “As an alternative way of remembering and forget-
ting (rooted in the personal, immediate, and particular), counter-
memories create an autonomous cultural space for marginalized social
groups,” calling attention “to the fact that history is multileveled and
plural-voiced narration.”5 These countermemories thus reveal a common
effort to construct an alternative collective memory of these events, often
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 97

articulated through personal and family histories. As Rocio G. Davis

suggests, “history and family are at the center of many Asian American
documentaries as filmmakers use family stories to claim for their fore-
bears and, by extension, for themselves, a place in America’s historical
and cultural narrative.” 6
It is therefore not surprising that a significant number of the docu-
mentaries that explore this period in Japanese American history use
microhistorical strategies, including some of the best-known and most
effective films portraying these events. For this study, I have chosen four
that exhibit clear microhistorical features while at the same time taking
distinctly cinematic approaches, showing how a microhistorical per-
spective can be expressed in different ways in relation to the same his-
torical events. The four films selected are: Something Strong Within,
based on home movies with no personal connection to the filmmakers;
From a Silk Cocoon and A Family Gathering, both with autobiographical
stories that rely heavily on home movies, snapshots, and family letters;
and History and Memory, halfway between documentary and essay film,
and with a more explicit exploration of historiographical issues.

SOMETHING STRONG WITHIN

Something Strong Within was originally made for the exhibition “Ameri-
ca’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Expe-
rience,” presented at the Japanese American National Museum in Los
Angeles, California, in 1994, although it was subsequently distributed
independently as a documentary. This forty-minute film was created by
Robert Nakamura and Karen L. Ishizuka based on the home movie col-
lections of nine home moviemakers, all of which were archived at the
museum itself. The film begins with a “prologue” that includes explana-
tory text on the historical context, followed by footage of the forced
removal of Japanese Americans in Guadalupe, a small Californian town,
filmed by the superintendent of the school district. After this prologue,
the title of the film appears, and then, superimposed over home movie
footage of one of the camps, we see a quote (taken from the diary of
Yuri N. Kuchiyama) that explains the reason behind the title and the
 9 8  IN C A R CERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E R I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

project: “Courage is something strong within you that brings out the
best in a person. Perhaps no one else may know or see, but it’s those hid-
den things unknown to others, that reveals a person to God and self.”
The rest of the documentary consists of footage of the internment camps
from the nine collections of home movies, with captions occasionally
superimposed to provide factual information related to the visuals, as
well as another six quotes taken from diaries written by Japanese Ameri-
cans in those years. The soundtrack features extradiegetic music—except
for one scene that includes a sound recording of a Boy Scouts Drum and
Bugle Corps in one of the camps—with the frequent addition of sound
effects synchronized with the image.
These elements clearly resemble Péter Forgács’s approach, analyzed in
chapter 3, with his use of home movies and amateur films as his main
visual source, as well as the inclusion of on-screen textual information
and instrumental music, which also plays an essential role here, as Ishi-
zuka notes: “Music was a critical element and considered the third partner
in a three-way artistic collaboration.”7 However, some important differ-
ences are observable. The most significant of these is the fact that the
makers of this film, Robert Nakamura (director and editor), Karen L.
Ishizuka (screenwriter and producer), and Dan Kuramoto (composer),
have a more direct relationship with the footage used. All three are Japa-
nese Americans, Kuramoto’s family was interned at the camps, and
Nakamura himself was actually interned at the Manzanar camp from
the ages of five to seven, although this information is not included in the
film. Moreover, the filmmakers have strived to the utmost to respect the
nature of the different home movies as “collections,” generally treating
them as independent blocks and indicating their creators at the begin-
ning of each collection. This approach led them to ignore chronological
or thematic criteria to structure the film, instead emphasizing the dis-
tinctive nature of each collection, visible in the random order of the dif-
ferent scenes, and further underscored by the repetitions that occur from
one section to the next. For the same reason, Nakamura does not manip-
ulate the appearance of the images as Forgács sometimes does, but
instead respects their original features, which are highly visible in the
changes from black and white to color of the original footage.
With these formal features, Something Strong Within offers an inter-
esting variation on the microhistorical documentary in its exploration of
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 99

the forced internment of Japanese Americans. Nakamura and Ishizuka

propose a clear change in the scale of observation, focusing on the expe-
riences of families unknown to public history, documented in their
home movies and in occasional quotes taken from personal diaries. The
filmmakers thus propose a history from below, articulated through the
ordinary lives that these families tried to carry on during their years of
internment in the camps. However, their approach breaks with the
orthodoxy of the more typical work of microhistorians, as here they do
not focus on a single family, nor do they attempt to base their documen-
tary on a narrative structure that would in some way reflect the story of
its protagonists. There are no interviews with the people shown in the
footage—who in some cases were still alive, like Dave Tatsuno—or any
other biographical material that might contextualize them. There is not
even any attempt to identify individuals when they appear in the images.
Instead, the emphasis is on the inherently fragmentary nature of home
movies, very much in line with the historiographical approach of Alf
Lüdtke and his Alltagsgeschichte, mentioned in other chapters. The con-
cept of the miniature posited by Lüdtke for the creation of societal patch-
work structures used to construct a history of everyday life is success-
fully expressed in this film by Nakamura and Ishizuka, who achieve this
effect of collage or patchwork with the home movie collections to recount
the history of those dark years, with some revealing nuances.8
The home movies used in Something Strong Within also serve to
highlight—perhaps even more clearly than in Forgács’s films—the limi-
tations of the available archives that microhistorians generally have to
work with. Although this is material preserved in institutional archives
(the Japanese American National Museum), it is not as exhaustive as
what would be expected of archives related to a public figure. The very
nature of home movies, which were always filmed in constrained cir-
cumstances due to the costly nature of the materials and processes, is
accentuated in this case because such filming was initially forbidden,
and even when it was later permitted, it was still being done by people in
conditions of incarceration. Moreover, because of the very nature of
these archives, the gaps, the lacunae, what has not been filmed, become
as eloquent as the filmed footage, in a way triggering Carlo Ginzburg’s
evidential paradigm, the use of conjecture as a hermeneutic method.
This is a strategy reinforced by the filmmakers themselves, who do not
 1 0 0  IN C A RC ERATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM ER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

attempt to share all the information available on these historical events

with the viewer, as might be expected of a conventional historian.
Instead, they aim for a more emotional type of engagement: “We created
a multi-layered media piece using a palette of home movies that unfolded
and played out to an evocative music score with the purpose of inviting
the viewer to emotionally get a feel for—rather than intellectually learn
about—camp.”9 While it is true that the home movie collections are
explicitly attributed to their authors, the documentary offers no infor-
mation about these individuals other than their names and the concen-
tration camps where they were interned. This constitutes an ambiguous
allusion to the human agency characteristic of microhistory because the
ultimate aim is to create a collective portrait constructed out of the
“miniatures” offered by each of the home moviemakers with their every-
day scenes.
This collective portrait contains a profound paradox that gives the
documentary a uniquely poignant quality, as it presents the apparent
everyday lives of ordinary families who happen to be interned in concen-
tration camps. Many of the scenes shown are similar to those found in
any other home movies: scenes in the snow (probably an exotic experi-
ence for families from Southern California), children playing games,
adults playing sports like baseball or football, or people simply posing
for the camera. Other scenes reflect everyday situations but reveal the
internment camp setting more directly: people cooking, eating, sewing,
or washing clothes, but as groups in collective facilities. Sometimes the
home movies explicitly document the location: wide shots of the bar-
racks or the desert or mountain landscape that surrounds them, images
of the living quarters, close-ups of the signs indicating the purpose of
each building, and shots of the arrival and departure of trains or buses.
This paradox is also reflected in the appropriation strategies applied to
the home movies, as this documentary combines all three modes out-
lined in chapter 2, in a manner similar to Forgács’s films. First, they are
used in a naturalized way, as there is a clear intention to maintain their
original meaning as portraits of the everyday life of these people. Sec-
ond, the context in which the home movies appear—the film Something
Strong Within—underscores the dramatic contradiction represented by
the home moviemakers’ situation of incarceration, giving these images a
meaning that is quite the opposite of the positive values of celebration
 INCARCERATION OF JAPANESE AMERICANS DURING WWII101

and reminiscing typically associated with home movies. And third, they
constitute a historical document of singular importance, as a visual
record of a historical injustice. Robert Rosen hints at this combination of
approaches when he suggests that the film’s most frequently used strat-
egy is dissonance, provoked by a clash of meanings, tonalities, and asso-
ciations. Rosen identifies the polarity between the indoor and outdoor
spaces of the camp as the most expressive of these dissonances:

On the outside lie the homes and communities that have been left
behind, the encompassing context of a free society. . . . On the inside
there are bleak barracks fashioned as homes, fences and guard towers as
omnipresent reminders of confinement. . . . Worst of all are the
dissonance-inducing images that bring the inside and the outside
together: trucks and trains coming and going, the post office and the
shipping dock with their constant flow of objects in and out of the
camps, and periodic oblique reminders of the war in the form of Japa-
nese American GIs on leave from fighting at the front.10

Indeed, the presence of the Japanese American soldiers provokes the

most acute dissonance, particularly bewildering for the contemporary
spectator. These were soldiers of the segregated 442nd Infantry Regi-
ment, made up of volunteers and recruits. Nakamura and Ishizuka
reflect this very clearly in a sequence showing the Heart Mountain Camp
(Wyoming), which begins with a quote by Junji Kumamoto: “In 1944 I
was inducted into the U.S. Army. The loyal American part of me wel-
comed the opportunity to show my loyalty. The rational part of me rec-
ognized the irony of being inducted from a concentration camp” (28’).
After this quote, we see footage of the camps with a USO dance for sol-
diers and a parade of boy scouts carrying U.S. flags. This sequence ends
with a visit by Sergeant Kuroki (29’–30’), who is welcomed by a large
crowd of camp inmates, turning the innocence of these home movies
into the most scathing condemnation of the injustice of their incarcera-
tion. But the filmmakers also highlight this irony much earlier in the
film (5’), when they show home movies of another Japanese American
soldier (see figure 4.1). After we see him point to his name on a board
with the names of enlisted soldiers, a close-up of the board shows a quote
by President Roosevelt, taken from his announcement of the formation
 1 02  IN C A R CERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM ER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

FIGURE 4.1 Something Strong Within. A Japanese American soldier from the 442nd
Regiment visiting his relatives at Minidako internment camp.

of the 442nd Regiment: “Americanism is a matter of mind and heart.

Americanism is not, and will never be, a matter of race or ancestry.”
Reading this quote on a board located in the Minidako concentration
camp effectively produces a dissonance that borders on incredulity for
the contemporary viewer.
Looking at the documentary as a whole, the resistance of the Japanese
American population in the face of adversity emerges as a central theme.
Their innocent smiles as they go about their everyday lives behind barbed
wire are disarming and incomprehensible except in the context of collec-
tive resistance. Ishizuka expresses as much when she indicates that the
goal of the film “was to show the resistance that is inherent in the
inmates’ conviction to make the best of the situation.”11 It is a goal that is
summed up very well in the final quote shown in the documentary,
which for the first time is by one of the home moviemakers:
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 03

I hope my home movies share with you one aspect of the camp
experience—that is the spirit of the Japanese American community.
Despite the loneliness and despair that enveloped us, we made the best
we could with the situation. I hope when you will look at the scenes of
mochitsuki, pipe repairing, dining hall duty and church service, you
look at the spirit of the people. You will see a people trying to recon-
struct a community despite overwhelming obstacles. That, I feel, is the
essence of these home movies.

It would indeed be difficult to find a more appropriate way to articu-

late this everyday resistance to the injustice suffered by Japanese
Americans for four years. As we see in From a Silk Cocoon, there were
protests during this period, which grew when a loyalty questionnaire
was issued in 1943, leading to the removal of “disloyal” inmates to Tule
Lake, a segregated camp. But Something Strong Within focuses on that
other, more everyday, kind of resistance, clearly evocative of one of the
key concepts posited by Michel de Certeau in his theory of everyday
life mentioned in previous chapters. As Certeau and Luce Giard sug-
gest, “everyday practice patiently and tenaciously restores a space for
play, an interval of freedom, a resistance to what is imposed (from a
model, a system, or an order).”12 Certeau is not referring to situations
like the one suffered by Japanese Americans during World War II, but
to the ordinary dynamics of modern societies, whose principles of
production seem to have colonized even everyday life. Nevertheless,
his understanding of everyday practices as practices of resistance elo-
quently describes the lives of Japanese Americans in the concentration
camps, reflected in the home movies used in this documentary. This is
even clearer in Luce Giard’s comment on Certeau’s work: “Beneath the
massive reality of powers and institutions . . . Certeau always discerns
a Brownian motion of microresistances, which in turn found micro-
freedoms, mobilize unsuspected resources hidden among ordinary
people, and in that way displace the veritable borders of the hold that
social and political powers have over the anonymous crowd.”13 The
terminology itself seems to connect, if only by way of analogy, to the
microhistorical dimension of Something Strong Within, where the bor-
ders have turned into physical barriers imposed by an overreaching
political power, against which “microresistances” are established by
 1 0 4  IN C A RC ERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM ER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

these ordinary people, who fight to maintain their identity and dig-
nity as U.S. citizens of Japanese descent.

FROM A SILK CO COON A N D

A FAMILY GATHERI N G

Other filmmakers have explored the mass incarceration of Japanese

Americans to tell of the impact it had on their own families. This was a
trend fostered by the Sansei (the third generation), resulting in films such
as Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? (Janice Tanaka, 1992),
Rabbit in the Moon (Emiko and Chizu Omori, 1999), and the three that are
analyzed below: From a Silk Cocoon, A Family Gathering, and History and
Memory. These films offer evidence of the frequent presence of autobio-
graphical approaches in microhistorical documentaries. As discussed in
chapter 1, autobiographical documentaries are not necessarily categorized
as historical documentaries, despite the fact that every autobiography is
based on a retrospective look on a person’s life. To be considered a histori-
cal documentary, a film’s retrospective look must have a historiographical
intention, to explore the past with an aim that goes further than describing
the specific experience of an individual or family. However, if these docu-
mentaries do engage in a revision of the historical past, they are likely to
adopt microhistorical approaches. The autobiographical perspective adds
nuances of its own, as it involves the exploration of recent historical peri-
ods—a history of the present—that gives the personal and family memory
a key role, supported by the use of documents belonging to the family
archive and testimonies by the filmmaker’s relatives (linking it as well to
practices of oral history). This is evident in the documentaries that are
analyzed here, From a Silk Cocoon and A Family Gathering.
From a Silk Cocoon (2005), co-directed by Stephen Holsapple, Emery
Clay III, and Satsuki Ina (who was also executive producer, scriptwriter,
and narrator), tells the story of Ina’s parents, who lived in concentration
camps for more than four years, during which time she and her brother
were born. Satsuki Ina had worked as a therapist researching the long-
term impact of the internment of Japanese Americans (not in her own
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 05

family, however, as her parents never spoke to her about their traumatic
experience), resulting in the production of the documentary Children of
the Camps in 1999. Shortly after this, her mother died, and she found 180
letters that had been exchanged between her parents while they were
incarcerated in separate prison camps, plus a diary that her mother had
written in from 1941 to 1946 and a haiku journal that her father had writ-
ten in almost every day while interned in Fort Lincoln, North Dakota
(see figure 4.2).14 With this documentation, the filmmaker decided to tell
the history of her parents, Itaru and Shizuko, a young couple that was
sent to an internment camp shortly after they got married, while Shi-
zuko was pregnant. Both took a stance against incarceration and rejected
the Loyalty Questionnaire, leading to their internment in the special
camp for “disloyals” at Tule Lake, their subsequent separation, and their
delayed release in 1946.

FIGURE 4.2 From a Silk Cocoon. Flmmaker Satsuki Ina going through her parents’
documents, photos, and letters.
 1 0 6  IN C A R CERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM ER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

From a Silk Cocoon can be understood in some ways as complemen-

tary and in others as contradictory to Something Strong Within, despite
both films taking a microhistorical perspective. First of all, there is a
clear difference in the type of archival sources used: in one case, visual
archives (home movies) predominate, while in the other, written docu-
ments are the primary source. Second, in Ina’s film there is a more
explicit contrast between the macrohistorical and microhistorical scale,
as the letters and diaries provide a chronicle that combines a narrative of
the main public events with her parents’ private reactions, fears, and
anxieties. In this way, From a Silk Cocoon is charged with an affective
dimension that appeals to the spectator more explicitly, an appeal that is
further supported by the music and the poetic force of the father’s haikus
inserted throughout the film. Moreover, in contrast to the collective por-
trait of Something Strong Within, Ina’s film presents an investigation
focusing on a young couple, Itaru and Shizuko, underpinned by an
explicit narrative structure that recounts their personal lives through the
autobiographical voice of their daughter. In this sense, this film is closer
to the Forgács’s films analyzed in chapter 3, in its dimension as a repre-
sentative fractal of the collective drama suffered by Japanese Americans.
Finally, the storylines and emotional texture of the two films also take
different routes: in contrast to the paradoxically ordinary and even cele-
bratory nature of the home movies in Something Strong Within, Ina’s
film offers a detailed chronicle of a perhaps lesser-known aspect of those
years: the hardships suffered by Japanese Americans who challenged the
injustice openly.
The main distinctive feature of From a Silk Cocoon lies in its extensive
use of written documents to give the film a microhistorical focus, mainly
through the letters written by Ina’s parents, her mother’s diary, and her
father’s haikus.15 The documentary also presents a few very significant
official documents: the birth certificates of Ina’s parents, who were both
born in the United States, their application to renounce their American
citizenship in 1944, and the document that gave them back that citizen-
ship in 1959. This documentation contributes to the construction of an
incomplete history, which the filmmakers sometimes fill in with brief
interventions by an omniscient narrator who refers to some basic aspects
of the public history, in a manner that is not altogether effective, as these
interventions weaken the microhistorical approach (although because of
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 07

their brevity they do not distort it excessively). Due to the lack of specific
visual sources, the filmmakers often resort to various types of archival
footage not related to the family and to frequent reenactments of the
scenes described in the letters and diaries, especially in the second part
of the film, in a way undermining its dramatic force as they evidence the
excessive dependence on written material.
The film also makes use of another valuable documentary source:
family photographs from those years. There are only a few of these, but
all of them have a strong emotional resonance, especially the ones show-
ing the two children in the concentration camps. These photographs
stand out as mnemonic objects that physically connect two generations:
the Nisei parents subjected to incarceration; and the Sansei children,
who experienced it at a very early age, barely suffering the experience
consciously.16 This material connection gives shape to a particular trans-
mission of the memory of the events, especially given that in this case the
parents kept silent about the period. As Marianne Hirsch argues, family
photographs constitute a unique expression of the intergenerational con-
nection, bridging separation and facilitating identification and affilia-
tion: “When we look at photographic images from a lost past world . . .
we look not only for information or confirmation, but for an intimate
material and affective connection that would transmit the affective qual-
ity of the events. We look to be shocked (Benjamin), touched, wounded
and pricked (Barthes’s punctum), torn apart (Didi-Huberman).”17 This
more affective and intimate quality of the family photograph acquires a
different dimension when it also serves as a means of intergenerational
transmission of traumatic memories. This process has been termed by
Hirsch as “postmemory,” a concept already mentioned in chapters 1
and 2, and which characterizes the histories contained in From a Silk
Cocoon, A Family Gathering, and History and Memory.
Postmemory is the mnemonic experience of the second generation,
“those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth,
whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous
generation shaped by traumatic events.”18 Hirsch proposes this new term
in response to the need to characterize a process that is not strictly
speaking based on personal memories, as this second generation did not
take part in the events, yet they experienced them intimately, with a
strong affective charge due to an intergenerational family connection,
 1 0 8  IN C A R CERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM ER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

which also separates it from history: “distinguished from memory by

generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.”19
Hirsch also emphasizes the mediated nature of postmemory (which is
more obvious than in ordinary mnemonic experience), as it is highly
dependent on mnemonic objects that connect to the traumatic past, with
special value given to family photographs. The autobiographical docu-
mentaries analyzed here clearly involve a postmnemonic process,
although their approaches do not stray as far from history as might be
inferred from a more literal understanding of Hirsch’s theory, precisely
because of their microhistorical focus. This can be seen in From a Silk
Cocoon, where Ina tries to learn about and understand the traumatic
experience of her parents, exploring their story through a family archive
that gives her access to a past imbued with a powerfully personal emo-
tional charge, but without losing the historiographical perspective
because it offers a microhistorical understanding of the events portrayed.
The postmnemonic perspective also helps to elucidate the value of the
family photographs included in From a Silk Cocoon, which otherwise
might be deemed secondary records compared to the diaries and letters.
Hirsch highlights the importance of this type of archival source in her
book Family Frames with an observation that is especially apt for this
documentary: “Photographs in their enduring ‘umbilical’ connection to
life are precisely the medium connecting first- and second-generation
remembrance, memory and postmemory. They are the leftovers, the
fragmentary sources and building blocks, shot through with holes, of the
work of postmemory.”20 This “umbilical” connection has an added reso-
nance here, because Satsuki and her brother were born in the concentra-
tion camps, and the photographs of them as small children in the camps
underscore their dependence on the maternal figure (since their father
was sent to another camp early on). At the same time, the limited num-
ber of pictures available reminds us of their fragmentary nature, their
status as leftovers of those distressing years for the Ina family.
Similar issues emerge in A Family Gathering, which has nuances of its
own, in an effective combination of constituent elements of postmemory,
autobiography, and microhistory. The film’s original thirty-minute ver-
sion was released in 1988, written and directed by Lise Yasui, while a sec-
ond, fifty-two-minute version (the one analyzed here) was produced for
television in 1989, directed by Lise Yasui and Ann Tegnell (who is also
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 09

credited as editor in both versions). The story of the Yasui family has
been one of the most widely studied and disseminated cases of the Japa-
nese American experience in the 1930s and 1940s, partly due to the
impact of the documentary.21 Lise Yasui uses in her film an autobio-
graphical perspective to explore the history of her grandparents and
their children. In 1905 her grandfather Masuo immigrated to Oregon,
where he went on to become a successful businessman in Hood River, as
well as something of a leader in the Japanese American community of
the region. In 1912 he married Shidzuyo, a young woman from Nanu-
kaichi, his hometown in Japan, and they had nine children. In 1942 they
were both sent to concentration camps, where they would spend four
years. After that they settled in Portland, but Masuo never recovered
from the trauma of internment, and in 1957 he committed suicide. His
granddaughter Lise did not learn of his tragic end until her father told
her in 1984, while she was in the process of making the documentary.
The intergenerational transmission of a traumatic memory is even
more of a central focus here, as is evident from this brief description of
the film’s storyline. The filmmaker also takes a more active role in this
process, as the story is not focused so much on the discovery of a family’s
past, as in From a Silk Cocoon, as on the filmmaker coming to terms with
her own identity within her family history. What distinguishes this film
from the others studied in this chapter is precisely its articulation around
this process of self-understanding, founded on a false premise—her
memory of a supposed meeting with her grandparents that never actu-
ally occurred—and on her incomplete and superficial knowledge of the
traumas suffered by her grandparents and their children during their
years of incarceration. In this sense, this is not a typical process of post-
memory, as the access to the traumatic memory was consciously blocked
by the filmmaker’s parents and their siblings through their silence about
her grandfather’s tragic fate, but also through their creation of an alter-
native history. The most paradigmatic example of that alternative history
would be the home movies her father filmed in the 1950s and 1960s, for
which he always provided a commentary that skirted around the tragic
moments of the family’s past. The documentary is thus presented as
another interesting variation on the postmnemonic process, insofar as
that process takes shape through the work undertaken by the filmmaker
with this film.
 1 1 0  IN C A R CERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E R I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

The autobiographical dimension of A Family Gathering marks the

story from the outset, with the filmmaker’s “I” at the heart of the
narrative—not in a solipsistic way, but as part of the network of relation-
ships constructed around the family, with three generations as the pro-
tagonists. This reflects Alisa Lebow’s observation, mentioned in chap-
ter 1, that autobiographical documentaries are often constructed “in the
first person plural.”22 At the beginning of the film a photograph of Yas-
ui’s grandfather appears on-screen, and the filmmaker begins her voice-
over narration: “This is my grandfather, Masuo Yasui. Through my
father’s stories, I knew him as a patriotic American and a self-made man.
What my father didn’t tell me was that in 1941, five days after Pearl Har-
bor, my grandfather was arrested and taken away by the FBI. When I
discovered this, I wondered what else I didn’t know.” This family history
is thus presented as the framework for her microhistorical investigation.
Although Yasui contextualizes it sporadically with references to major
events in public history (often illustrated with newsreel footage), the film
offers a study of this era on a reduced scale of observation, with a narra-
tive structure that relates the family history of the Yasuis and the trauma
they experienced following Masuo’s arrest and the family’s incarcera-
tion. To construct this story the filmmaker’s main sources are interviews
with her father, Robert, her uncles Homer and Min and her aunt Yuka,
her father’s home movies, and, to a lesser extent, the letters her grandfa-
ther wrote during his incarceration. The use of interviews with the pro-
tagonists of the past events once again links this film to the methods and
sources of oral history, and to the context of a history of the present,
where memory plays a key role in the construction of history because it is
still possible to have direct access to witnesses of the events. However,
their use here is mainly at the service of the microhistorical enterprise,
as the history of the Yasui family is understood as representative of
events that affected an entire community, offering a deeper understand-
ing of those dark years in Japanese American history.
The other main source in this documentary are the home movies
filmed by Lise Yasui’s father, which in a way become the cornerstone of
its narrative, even though they are used quite sparingly. These are movies
filmed when her father was already an adult in the 1950s and 1960s, with
no direct connection to the concentration camp experience. However,
for Yasui they constitute the “umbilical cord” that links her to her
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 1 1

grandparents, the medium connecting intergenerational remembrance.

The filmmaker relies on these home movies to modulate her story, in a
strategy that oscillates between a naturalized use and other more sym-
bolic or performative uses. Their naturalized use is made clear practi-
cally from the beginning, when we see a home movie of a girl while the
filmmaker’s voice-over tells us: “This is me in 1959” (see figure 4.3). This is
followed by images of her first years on the East Coast, with her maternal
family, providing important information about her parents’ interracial
marriage. Her voice-over specifies this information, but adds another
layer of meaning by offering her subjective experience of this multiracial
background: “I was raised in Pennsylvania, surrounded by blue-eyed
relatives from my mom’s side of the family. . . . As a kid, I thought the
only difference between me and my relatives was my Japanese name. I
never felt different. This was the only family I knew” (2’). The extradi-
egetic music provides yet another layer, combining Western piano rhythms

FIGURE 4.3 A Family Gathering. Filmmaker Lise Yasui as a child with her mother’s
family.
 1 1 2  IN C A R CERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E R I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

with traditional Japanese elements, with the shakuhachi (a Japanese

flute) and koto (a traditional Japanese stringed instrument), composed by
a Japanese/African American composer, Sumi Tonooka, whose mother
was also interned during the war. As Cassandra Van Buren notes, this
musical hybridization functions as an “expression of Yasui’s multifac-
eted experience living in the United States as a woman of half Japanese,
half white ancestry,” and also of the experience of her father and his
siblings, “since they too live under the influence of two different cultural
systems.”23
As the film progresses, Yasui elaborates on this naturalized use of the
home movies, underscoring their role as mnemonic objects that give
privileged access to the past. But she also contrasts that role with another
function given to them by her father, as a barrier to access to her family’s
traumatic past, a wall made out of the happy present of the domestic
scenes. Her voice-over sums this up insightfully: “I expected that one
day, my dad would tell me about the traumas of his past, but he never
did. Instead he showed home movies. . . . For me, they represented the
boundary between the father I knew and the father whose real feelings
about his past might always remain hidden from me” (32’). This also
serves to highlight the incomplete nature of these mnemonic objects,
which conceal as much as they reveal, a problem that takes on special
significance given that this film and others made by filmmakers of the
Sansei generation, such as Janice Tanaka, Satsuki Ina, and Rea Tajiri,
seek to explore these gaps and silences, to bring their family stories back
from oblivion. Peter X. Feng identifies these gaps as a common feature of
Asian American identity, which, in his words, “is defined not by history,
but by gaps in history,” because “the absence of information bespeaks a
historical trauma that defines Asian Americans.”24 By examining these
traumas and the reasons for their erasure, Feng adds, these documenta-
ries “seek identity in the interplay between memory and history; in so
doing, they further theorize the relation between family stories and the
histories of ethnicity.”25
For Yasui, her family’s home movies actually play a key role in the
intergenerational connection, which in a way seems to help her to get
around the wall built by her father, as they connect her with her grand-
parents through a reminiscence constructed in her memory that never
actually happened. This memory is presented as a kind of framing device
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 1 3

for the film, as it is mentioned at the beginning and at the end, providing
a fundamental interpretative key to A Family Gathering. The first scene
shows home movies of her grandparents with her brother (see figure 4.4),
while she recalls in a voice-over the evening that she spent with them in
her childhood, before concluding by contradicting her own recollection:
“Later, I learned that my grandparents never made such a visit, that I
never met my grandfather at all. The memory was one I’d made up, a
creation drawn from all the stories I’d heard and the images on my
father’s home movies” (1’). This “false” memory, illustrated metonymi-
cally with several of these home movies, creates the umbilical cord that
connects Yasui to her grandparents, establishing a clear postmnemonic
bond that acquires its fullest meaning when she learns about her grand-
father’s full story and his tragic end. In addition, this invented memory
gives the home movies a performative quality as memory creators. This
might seem to run counter to their more obvious interpretation as pro-
viders of transparent access to the past, yet home movies in themselves

FIGURE 4.4 A Family Gathering. Lise Yasui’s grandparents with her brother.
 1 1 4  IN C A R CERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E R I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

already have something of a performative quality, not just because of the

openly self-conscious nature of the filming process but also because of
their mode of representation. As Roger Odin suggests, in a pragmatic
perspective on this type of filmmaking, a home movie is not really fin-
ished until it is projected for the family, at which point the images are
completed by the commentary of the different family members. In this
way, Odin explains, the events captured in home movies end up con-
structing an imaginary, a mythical recreation of a lived past that fulfills
the social function of securing the family institution.26 In this sense,
although Yasui never met her grandfather physically, she did meet him
vicariously through the home movies projected in her home, taking part
in that final stage when the home movie is completed with the family
commentary. For this reason, in the final scene, which shows the same
home movies seen at the beginning of the film, the filmmaker repeats the
“memory” she created based on her father’s home movies, reinforcing
the quality of mythical recreation of the family past identified by Odin:
“Although my grandfather died before I had the chance to meet him, I
always remember that one evening I stayed up late listening to him talk-
ing into the night” (49’–50’).
Yasui in fact uses her family archive for a purpose that transcends the
traditional view of it as a repository of the past, in order to highlight a
more postmodern understanding of it as a site of knowledge production.
Of particular relevance to this approach is Terry Cook’s explanation,
mentioned in chapter 2, of the record as “a cultural signifier, a mediated
and ever-changing construction, not some empty template into which
acts and facts are poured.”27 These home movies are understood in this
way, with a meaning emerging not only from the original context in
which they were created—their filming and family viewing—but from
their subsequent reuse in A Family Gathering. In this process, these
home movies acquire different layers of meaning that render them more
complex: from an initial naturalizing function as evidential records of
the filmed present, to their symbolic nature as a barrier blocking access
to the past, to their status as a vehicle for postmemory, connecting inter-
generational memories marked by traumatic historical experiences.
Hence, in the end, Yasui’s narration expresses a new perspective on this
family archive: “Now I watch these movies and everything looks a little
different. I’m aware of the history that lies behind these images; and the
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 1 5

moments of togetherness recorded here I no longer take for granted. It’s

a past my family made for themselves. And it’s a past they gave to me.”
The images illustrating this sequence (48’–49’) offer an excellent encap-
sulation of these different dimensions: from scenes that exude innocence
(her cousins as children smiling or playing, or her mother with her and
her brother when they were small children) to a scene of her mother try-
ing on kimonos with her mother-in-law, as another reminder of the
family’s multiethnic context. These are images of “togetherness” that
Yasui is able to interpret with greater depth at a point when she has a
better understanding of the family traumas caused by the years of
incarceration.
A Family Gathering thus offers an original microhistorical approach,
supported by the autobiographical voice of Lise Yasui, the memories of
her relatives, and her family’s home movies. At the same time, it clearly
exhibits the features identified by Feng as characteristic of these types of
films made by Asian American filmmakers, with their interplay between
memory and history, fusing the family stories and the histories of eth-
nicity in order to explore personal and collective identity. The awareness
of the constructed nature of the family story—the past that her family
“made” for themselves and gave to her—adds a final note of reflexivity to
her approach to history, which also highlights the value of home movies
as visual documents and underscores the complexity underlying their
apparent simplicity.

HISTORY AND M EMO RY

The questions raised by A Family Gathering in its examination of mem-

ory and history are explored even more explicitly in the last case study of
this chapter, History and Memory. This thirty-two-minute film made by
Rea Tajiri, released in 1991, has captured the attention of academics both
for its historiographical approach and for its more auteurial nature,
straddling the boundaries between documentary, experimental, and
essay film. As a microhistorical work, Tajiri’s film tackles the history of
the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans on a reduced scale of
observation articulated around her own family. The film succinctly
 1 1 6  IN C A R CERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E R I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

recounts the experiences of her family, who were transferred first to the
Salinas Assembly Center and then to the Poston concentration camp.
But Tajiri is not concerned with merely offering a chronological account
of these events. Instead, she explores two threads that intersect repeat-
edly over the course of the film: one that is more personal, about the
scars that these events left on her family and herself, and the other more
speculative, related to the narratives constructed by history and the
audiovisual representations that have supported or challenged them.
The sources that Tajiri works with are very diverse. They include oral
sources, which the filmmaker uses very sparingly: the recollections of
her father, uncles, and aunts; some of her own recollections of family
stories; and the ambiguous testimony of her mother, who seems unable
or unwilling to remember those years. She also uses a few family objects
of special mnemonic significance: a wooden bird carved by her grand-
mother and a wooden heart carved by her grandfather in Poston, her
grandparents’ ID cards from 1942, and a handful of family photographs
(her father as a soldier, her family before the war, a couple of photos at
the Poston camp, and others that are undated). Tajiri fills in her story
with other audiovisual sources: photographs of the internment camps,
official propaganda films and newsreels, fiction films, the home movies
of other families, some reenactments, and brief sections of footage shot
specifically for the film. She makes no effort to conceal the fragmentary
nature of her family’s documentary sources, and in a manner in keeping
with the work of microhistorians, she attempts to fill in the gaps with
these other audiovisual sources, resulting in the kind of combination of
erudition and imagination, proof and possibility, that Carlo Ginzburg
praised in the work of Natalie Z. Davis, as mentioned in chapter 1.28
The autobiographical nature of the documentary again underscores
the human agency of the microhistorical enterprise, doing so with a
markedly postmnemonic approach. From the outset Tajiri makes it clear
that the events of the 1940s have left a scar on her life that she needs to
examine and to heal. This is conveyed in a scene with scrolling text over
a black background, which tells the imaginary story of the spirit of her
grandfather watching her parents “argue about the unexplained night-
mares their daughter has been having on the 20th anniversary of the
bombing of Pearl Harbor” (1’). Later, she will elaborate on this in a voice-
over, while we see home movies by David Tatsuno at another camp
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 1 7

(Topaz), in a metonymic reference to the place where her family lived

during the years of their incarceration:

I began searching for a history, my own history, because I had known all
along that the stories I had heard were not true and parts had been left
out. I remember having this feeling growing up that I was haunted by
something, that I was living within a family full of ghosts. There was
this place that they knew about. I had never been there, yet I had a
memory of it. I could remember a time of great sadness before I was
born. We had been moved, uprooted. We had lived with a lot of pain. I
had no idea where these memories came from, yet I knew the place.
(12’–13’)

In this way, Tajiri makes the postmnemonic nature of her autobiographi-

cal work explicit; she has a memory of that past, she can “remember a
time of great sadness” as her own, despite the fact that it occurred before
she was born. The filmmaker returns to this idea again when she decides
to visit the place she already knew, even though she had never been there:
the Poston concentration camp. In a scene of this visit to the camp, which
shows images of buildings in ruins, she speaks again in a voice-over of
the nature of her personal search for her family’s traumatic past: “I began
searching because I felt lost, ungrounded, somewhat like a ghost that
floats over terrain, witnessing others living their lives, and yet not having
one of its own” (22’).
Tajiri does not base this postmnemonic experience, as might be
expected, on stories told by her relatives or material objects like family
photographs. The most significant exception to this occurs in the brief
sequence that shows a close-up of a wooden bird over a black background
(12’). In a voice-over, Tajiri tells us that it was a gift from her grandmother
to her mother, who kept it in her jewelry box and would not let anyone
touch it. Many years later, Tajiri would discover a photograph of a wood-
carving class at the Poston camp in which her grandmother appears, and
thus she came to understand the mnemonic value of the object for her
mother. Apart from this reference to the wooden bird, her postmne-
monic experience is articulated with a more experimental approach,
based on a subjectivity that pervades the whole film through her voice-
overs, which recall these moments of great sadness that occurred before
 1 1 8  IN C A RCERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E R I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

she was born and her feeling haunted by traumatic events that she herself
never experienced. The intergenerational links that give rise to this post-
memory become ghostly here, but real, expressed most clearly in the
image she recreates of her mother filling a canteen at Poston (see fig-
ure 4.5), with the filmmaker herself playing the role of her mother. This is
an image that, as Glen M. Mimura suggests, represents “a symbolic rec-
onciliation that imaginatively restores the history of the internment to
the narrative structure of personal memory and family history.”29 Intro-
duced very close to the beginning of the film, this image becomes a visual
and narrative leitmotiv: an image linked to the only memory Tajiri has of
her mother talking about the internment camps, which she now decides
to reenact, vesting it with a performative quality that is key to her narra-
tive. It is an image that reappears several times during the film, as her
particular way of constructing a tunnel of memory that can lead her into
that traumatic past and reconnect her with her mother. It is an image

FIGURE 4.5 History and Memory. Reenactment of the scene of Rea Tajiri’s mother fill-
ing a canteen at Poston camp.
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 1 9

that she has placed in a specific physical location, the Poston camp that
she goes to visit, at the barracks where her mother had lived. It is an
image that she has given a story, which she has created with her film, and
which she offers metaphorically as a gift to her mother, as she says in her
final voice-over: “For years I’ve been living with this picture, without a
story, feeling a lot of pain, not knowing how they fit together. But now I
found I could connect the picture to the story, I could forgive my mother
her loss of memory, and could make this image for her” (30’).
Consistent with her more essayistic and experimental style, Tajiri
relates her investigation of her family’s past to the investigation con-
ducted by a fictional character in Bad Day at Black Rock, the only post-
war Hollywood film to deal with the anti-Japanese prejudices that existed
before the war and, more incidentally, with the incarceration of Japanese
Americans. Its protagonist, John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy), comes to a
small town looking for a Japanese American named Kimoko, but instead
of finding him he discovers that he was killed after the attack on Pearl
Harbor, due to racist prejudices and envy because of his financial pros-
perity after he had brought water to a barren land. Tajiri establishes some
interesting parallels between this Hollywood film and her own family
history, from the prosperity of Japanese Americans—who even brought
water to the land at the Poston camp—to her mother’s train journey to
Poston, illustrated with images of Macreedy’s train trip (20’). But the
filmmaker goes a step further, linking Kimoko’s disappearance with the
fate of Japanese Americans: “Kimoko’s disappearance from Black Rock
was like our disappearance from history. His absence is his presence.
Somehow, I could identify with this search” (26’). Macreedy will never
find even a picture of Kimoko, Tajiri tells us in a voice-over, while giving
us a fleeting glimpse of a picture of her father in the army in 1942 and
another of her mother from around the same time. She does have a pic-
ture, she seems to say, but it is a picture without a story, because her mother
was unwilling or unable to remember. This is why she creates the image
that her mother does remember—filling a canteen with water—an image
that Tajiri inserts into a story as a gift for her, but also as a way for the
filmmaker herself to make sense of the traumatic memory of her family,
turned now into to a personal memory, into postmemory.
Into this microhistorical investigation focusing on her personal and
family experience, Tajiri interweaves a more openly essayistic dimension,
 1 2 0  IN C A RC ERATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM ER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

focusing on the way history is told and the way that the relationships
between memory, history, and archive are understood. This brings the
film close to a postmodern approach to history, as Robert Rosenstone
suggests.30 As discussed in chapter 1, Rosenstone argues that the most
genuinely postmodern history is being done by filmmakers, specifically
in films like History and Memory: works with a self-reflexive dimension,
making sense of past events “in an open-ended, rather than totalized,
manner,” without a classical narrative structure, and very conscious of
the fact that the present is the site of all past representation.31 Tajiri’s film
effectively conveys this postmodern historiographical sensibility, as
through a highly self-conscious autobiographical voice the filmmaker
offers an exploration of the past interwoven with the present, eschewing
a conventional narrative structure in favor of a rich, complex network of
sources and relationships that open up different pathways for the viewer.
However, it is also an approach that upholds the referentiality of history,
avoiding a skeptical view often associated with postmodernism, even if it
does use deconstructive strategies to question the ways in which that his-
tory is told.
To achieve this, Tajiri makes decisive use of collage as a means of
exploring the complex relationships between personal memory and pub-
lic history, constructing a film that in Bakhtinian terms could be
described as polyphonic.32 With an essay style that evokes Jean-Luc
Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988), the filmmaker weaves together
complex relationships between image, voice, and text. An example of
this can be seen in the previously mentioned opening sequence, where
text describing an imagined scene scrolls over a black background. The
filmmaker’s voice overlaps with the titles, forcing the viewer to relate two
expressive verbal channels that appear simultaneously. This tactic, which
is used again several times, is complicated further when layers of images
with different origins are added. This is the case in another elaborate
sequence, where excerpts from Bad Day at Black Rock are inserted for
the first time (13’–15’). The filmmaker juxtaposes images from the Holly-
wood film with footage of a girl skating at an internment camp (taken
from a home movie), while we hear dialogue from the Hollywood film
and the testimony of Tajiri’s niece. This is followed by the sound of Taji-
ri’s mother’s voice over a black background, while a caption indicates
that she is not able to remember, that she can only remember why she has
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 21

forgotten. After this we see text scrolling over a photo-negative image,

and finally we return to Bad Day at Black Rock, which connects with the
present of Tajiri’s mother through a motif of flowers. In such a complex-
ity of layers and time frames, viewers must find their own way of dis-
cerning the meaning of the sequences, which are not always explicit and
lack a closed or chronologically linear narrative.
Despite this sometimes labyrinthine structure, there is a thread that
does give a certain continuity to this historiographical endeavor: a criti-
cism of the official history, which condemned Japanese Americans to
silence for several decades. Indeed, it could be argued that the film offers
an interesting cinematic expression of a Foucauldian counter-history. As
José Medina explains, for Foucault, “a counter-history reflects and pro-
duces discontinuous moments in a people’s past, gaps that are passed
over in silence, interstices in the socio-historical fabric of a community
that have received no attention.”33 In opposition to the unitary vision
sought by the official history, Tajiri presents a piece of history that has
been kept in the dark or in shadows, positing a counter-history, which
Foucault himself describes as “the discourse of those who have no glory,
or of those who have lost it and who now find themselves . . . in darkness
and silence.”34 In History and Memory this counter-history translates
into the exposure of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans
(through an autobiographical prism), but also into a critical revision of
the official discourse on the events and the popular discourse on Ameri-
can national identity, carried out with the tools of the essay film, com-
bining word, image, and editing.
The deconstruction of the official discourse—shown mainly through
newsreels produced by the U.S. government to justify the incarceration—
begins with its juxtaposition against the microhistorical narrative of the
filmmaker and her family, which foregrounds her bewilderment and suf-
fering over the inexplicable nature of the government’s actions. Tajiri
emphasizes this critical reading the first time she shows one of these
newsreels—“Japanese Relocation”—by superimposing the question
“Who Chose What Story to Tell?” over the images (8’; see figure 4.6).
Immediately thereafter, the filmmaker takes a step further by including
an excerpt from the patriotic Hollywood musical Yankee Doodle Dandy
(1942). This film highlights the mainstream discourse that promoted a
unitary vision of the nation in times of war, made explicit by the musical
 1 2 2  IN C A R C ERATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM E R I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

FIGURE 4.6 History and Memory. An image from the U.S. government newsreel
“Japanese Relocation,” with Tajiri’s superimposed title: “Who Chose What Story
to Tell?”

number shown, with its refrain “we’re one for all, all for one,” a message
that clashes drastically with the flagrant violation of the rights of U.S.
citizens of Japanese ancestry that was taking place at the time. Tajiri
inserts the testimonies of an aunt and an uncle and footage of the camps
filmed by the army, while maintaining the patriotic tune from Yankee
Doodle Dandy in the background, now openly undermined by its colli-
sion with this material.35 The final part of History and Memory makes
reference to a third Hollywood movie, the only high-budget film made
about these events, much later in 1990: Come See the Paradise. Although
it could be considered a laudable effort by Hollywood to raise public
awareness about events that had been silenced for decades, Tajiri is
highly critical of this new piece of mainstream cinema. The filmmaker
now expresses her deconstructivist revision through a voice-over read-
ing a film review written by her nephew after the film was released, full
of irony toward its commercial and excessively sentimental approach. In
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 23

addition, the filmmaker intersperses images from Come See the Paradise
with footage from the internment process at the camps and pictures of
Japanese American families posing in front of the U.S. flag. The clash of
documentary photographic records with Hollywood fiction thus visually
underscores the criticism expressed in the voice-over toward the superfi-
cial nature of the Alan Parker film.
But Rea Tajiri goes further in her historiographical reflection, as she
makes use of an openly reflexive strategy to examine how history is told.
This happens very clearly in a sequence early in the film (5’–7’), where she
proposes four types of relationships between historical events and the
images that represent them. The first refers to images of an evidential
nature: “There are things which have happened in the world while there
were cameras watching, things we have images for.” This category is
illustrated with footage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor taken on loca-
tion and a caption that reads: HISTORY. The second category is associ-
ated with images that are restaged in fiction films: “There are other
things which have happened while there were no cameras watching,
which we restage in front of cameras to have images of.” This category is
illustrated with scenes of the bombing from fiction films: one Japanese
film, Hawai Mare Okino Senjo Eigwa (1942); and two Hollywood movies,
the docudrama December 7th (1943) and the classic From Here to Eternity
(1953). What is interesting here is that Tajiri also labels these scenes with
the same caption, HISTORY, calling to mind the approach of historians
like Robert Rosenstone or Marc Ferro, with their argument that histori-
cal fiction films constitute another way of doing history (see figure 4.7).36
Tajiri then adds two more categories: “There are things which have hap-
pened for which the only images that exist are in the minds of observers,
present at the time, while there are things which have happened for
which there have been no observers, except the spirits of the dead.” Her
voice-over is heard here over a black screen, on which scrolling text
appears, telling how a crew of workers took away the family house,
because it was the property of “enemy aliens.” There are no images for
this scene, but it is a scene witnessed by the spirit of her grandfather,
according to the text. In this way, the filmmaker implicitly raises the
question of the reliability of the different types of representation and the
ways that history is told. Tajiri seems to support a narrativist approach to
history, which is also suggested in the question the filmmaker asks (as
already noted above) over the image of the government newsreel “Japanese
 1 24  IN C A R C ERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM ER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

FIGURE 4.7 History and Memory. An image from the Hollywood film From Here to
Eternity, labeled as HISTORY by the filmmaker.

Relocation”: “Who Chose What Story to Tell?” However, as Janet

Walker argues, the filmmaker recognizes the possibility—and indeed
the necessity—of knowing the truth about what happened, as her “insis-
tence on an irrevocable truth” is evident, although it is expressed through
a “refusal of the realist mode,” assigning a central role to memory, obliv-
ion, and interpretation in historical processes.37 In this sense, Walker
identifies this film as a paradigmatic example of what she defines as
“trauma films,” a type of film that addresses traumatic events “in a non-
realist style that figures the traumatic past as meaningful, fragmentary,
virtually unspeakable, and striated with fantasy constructions.”38
The central role given to this traumatic experience makes memory a
basic building block of the investigation in History and Memory. This
constitutes a clear example of the assertion made in chapter 1, that the
autobiographical perspective of these microhistorical documentaries
makes personal memory the basis of the historiographical enterprise,
 IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANES E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 1 25

establishing a specific link between the lived memory and public history.
Tajiri insightfully articulates this personal memory through its different
temporalities, with past and present dynamically intertwined, as sug-
gested in the Greek concept of kairos. In this way, the film eschews a
chronological structure to rely more on Deleuzian “crystal-images” that
include this interweaving of temporalities and underscore the complex-
ity of remembering.39 It does this in ways so diverse that they are difficult
to summarize here: by evading synchronous sounds and images; by
overlapping expressive layers of text, voice, and image referring to differ-
ent time frames; by including characters not anchored in chronological
time, like the spirit of Tajiri’s grandfather; or by constructing temporal
relationships between fiction scenes and documentary records.
This personal/family memory is a memory that has been scarred by
traumatic events. The filmmaker bares these family scars subtly, reveal-
ing them mainly through the frailty of her mother’s memory.40 The film
could thus be understood as a kind of cure for her mother’s amnesia,
symbolized in the image of the canteen being filled up with water, which
Tajiri offers to her as a gift, and at the same time as a remedy for the col-
lective amnesia of American society, which had forgotten the trauma
suffered by Japanese Americans. These traumatic scars also give the
silences and gaps a special significance, returning to Feng’s ideas about
the nature of Asian American identity, and turns them into a driving
force for the filmmaker’s historical/creative work, as Marita Sturken
argues: “Tajiri is compelled by the gaps in her mother’s memory, by her
own sense of incompleteness, and by the absent presence of the camps in
national memory to counter the historical images of her parents’ fami-
lies’ internment.” 41 The filmmaker understands these gaps actually not as
obstacles but as eloquent statements, in an approach that echoes the way
microhistorians often deal with the scattered and fragmentary sources
for their written works. This is made explicit in her voice-over comment
about Kimoko’s disappearance in Bad Day at Black Rock, which she
compares to the disappearance of Japanese Americans from history.
“His absence is his presence,” says Tajiri, who considers the Hollywood
movie in parallel with her own process, as a “search for an ever-absent
image and the desire to create an image where there are so few.” The
movement between personal/family memory, trauma, microhistory, and
public history is encapsulated in this reflection, which is paradoxically
 1 2 6  IN C A RC ERATIO N O F JAPANES E AM ER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

inspired by a Hollywood fiction film. It is yet another example of the

formal and thematic complexity of Tajiri’s film, which uses an experi-
mental, essayistic approach to present a highly provocative variation on
the microhistorical documentary.
The journey taken in this chapter from Something Strong Within to
History and Memory, with From a Silk Cocoon and A Family Gathering
as intermediate points, has revealed a diverse range of microhistorical
approaches to the same historical event: the incarceration of Japanese
Americans during World War II. It has also served once again to under-
score the value of home movies as historical documents with a complex-
ity not evident at first glance, by placing them in dialogue with other
historical sources, especially the written or oral testimonies of people
involved in the historical events. The filmmakers Ina, Yasui, and Tajiri
have also undertaken intense explorations of intergenerational memory
in the construction of their microhistorical narratives, offering thought-
provoking variations on postmemory in their films. In doing so, they
have enriched our understanding of history through microhistorical and
autobiographical perspectives, where personal memory and family
archives become a central focus.
 5
RITHY PANH’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
NARRATIVE OF THE CAMBODIAN GENOCIDE

The Missing Picture

T
he Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh has garnered an interna-
tional reputation for his films about the genocide perpetrated by
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975–1979), which he witnessed
personally in his teenage years, and which resulted in the deaths of
roughly 1.7 million Cambodians (around a quarter of the country’s pop-
ulation). Panh explores this event in depth in six films made over the
course of more than twenty years: Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy
(1996); S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003); Duch: Master of
the Forges of Hell (2011); The Missing Picture (2013); Exile (2016); and
Graves Without a Name (2018). In the first three documentaries, Panh
takes something of a microhistorical approach to this historical period,
which becomes rather more explicit in The Missing Picture. In this chap-
ter, I offer an analysis of these films, beginning with a brief study of
Bophana, S-21, and Duch, followed by a more detailed examination of
The Missing Picture as an essayistic, microhistorical documentary.

A D O CUMEN TA RY INVESTIGAT I ON OF T HE
C AM BO D I A N GEN OCIDE: FROM B O P H AN A TO D U C H

It is very significant that the first documentary that Rithy Panh made about
the Cambodian genocide, in 1996, centered on an unknown individual,
 1 2 8  R ITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H I CA L N A R R ATI VE

Bophana, who in a way represents a national tragedy, as reflected in the

film’s full title: Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy.1 Panh did not actually
discover Bophana, as her case had already been made public by Elisabeth
Beker, who dedicated a chapter to her in the book When the War Was
Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution.2 Bophana was an edu-
cated woman who survived the horrors of the civil war only to become a
victim of the repression of the Khmer Rouge that followed it. Married in
1975 to a former Buddhist monk turned Khmer guerrilla, Bophana and
her husband were arrested the following year when the leader her hus-
band served was purged from the regime. The couple were taken to Tuol
Sleng—the infamous Security Prison-21 (or S-21) for disgraced party
members—and executed a few months later. Years afterward a dossier on
Bophana was found in the S-21 archives; this dossier was rather unusual,
since in addition to the forced confession written and signed by all “sus-
pects,” it contained the letters Bophana had exchanged with her hus-
band. With this material Rithy Panh decided to make a documentary
exploring the painful history of his country through the specific story of
this woman.
The background briefly outlined above suggests an approach that
could potentially be classified as microhistorical. This is evident in the
scale of observation, which examines the scars of those horrific years
through the personal story of one woman, using a narrative structure
that traces her life’s journey. It thus reflects the kind of prosopography
from below posited by Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, based on the
investigation of a case study tracing an individual proper name not visi-
ble in public history.3 The film also involves the filmmaker/historian
working with archival sources that are quite limited but at the same time
highly revealing—the letters exchanged between spouses—as they offer
an original perspective that is antithetical to the prisoners’ forced con-
fessions. This documentation makes Bophana one of those cases that
microhistorians label as the “normal exception,” which function “as
clues to or traces of a hidden reality, which is not usually apparent in the
documentation.” 4 Moreover, Bophana’s story is framed within its macro-
historical context with the occasional support of archival footage of the
Khmer Rouge regime and the explanatory narration of a voice-over,
thereby transcending its individual nature and making her case histori-
cally representative. It is true that the voice-over adopts an omniscient
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H ICAL N A R R ATI VE1 29

perspective typical of expository documentaries, with a predominantly

explanatory purpose, giving an impression of objectivity that is not nor-
mally a feature of microhistorical documentaries, where more room is
usually given for questioning historiographical processes. This is proba-
bly because the documentary was made for television, which generally
requires a more informative approach that is often supported by this
type of omniscient narration.
Perhaps the most characteristic element of the documentary is the
image of Bophana herself, taken from a mug shot, which becomes the
visual leitmotif of the film (see figure 5.1). These images of prisoners are
not mere descriptive photographs, because as Vicente Sánchez-Biosca
explains, “they do not document a suspect, but produce a culprit,” which
makes them “performative photographs insofar as they transform real-
ity.”5 Panh uses Bophana’s mug shot to establish a particular filmic dia-
logue that infuses it with life, redeeming it from oblivion. Right from the

FIGURE 5.1 Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy. Bophana’s mug shot at the Tuol Sleng
Genocide Museum (the former S-21 prison).
 1 3 0  RITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP HI CA L N A R R ATI VE

first few minutes, where we see the walls of the former S-21 prison (now
the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) covered in mug shots of anonymous
prisoners, the camera zooms in on this specific photograph of Bophana,
with its frontal gaze, giving it greater depth as her story is revealed. This
photograph ultimately acquires a symbolic quality that Panh maintains
in his subsequent documentaries, becoming a visual icon of the Cambo-
dian genocide in his films and in the collective imaginary of audiences
familiar with these historical events.
However, in the last twenty minutes, the documentary shifts away
from this microhistorical investigation of Bophana to broaden the focus
to the history of the S-21 prison. We are shown the place where Bophana
was interned and interrogated, although in fact this final part focuses
mainly on explaining the history of this place of repression, through the
testimonies of three people: two survivors (one being the painter Vann
Nath) and one of the prison guards. After their testimonies, the scene
shifts to the house of Bophana’s mother-in-law, to conclude the film with
her final testimony and with pictures of Bophana and her husband, along
with an explanatory caption with the dates of their arrest and execution.
The change of focus in the final part of Bophana could be interpreted
as a prologue to Panh’s next documentary on the Cambodian genocide,
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, released in 2003. In this film,
which had a major impact in the documentary film community, Panh
reconstructs the dynamics of the prison based on testimonies of a few
prison guards and survivors. Particularly important among these wit-
nesses are two who were already featured in Bophana: the painter Vann
Nath and the guard Him Houy. The film could still be described as tak-
ing something of a microhistorical approach, although here Panh relies
much more on the oral testimonies of the witnesses and on reenactments
performed by the guards of their work in the same cells at S-21, without
the presence this time of a voice-over narration. The archival documents
from the prison—including Bophana’s mug shot—again form part of the
exploration, but more as catalysts for the testimonies than as objects of
the investigation itself. The filmmaker also makes use, in the first part
of the film, of propaganda films produced by the Khmer Rouge to pro-
vide the context necessary to explain what happened at S-21.
The power of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine thus lies in the
access it gives us to “everyday life” in the prison, through the dialogue
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H ICAL N A R R ATI VE1 31

and confrontation established between survivors and guards. In this

way, Panh advocates an approach to history based on the testimony of its
anonymous protagonists, who can provide alternative narratives to the
official discourse, as Leshu Torchin explains: “Panh’s la parole filmée is a
form of speech that privileges the vernacular and the incomplete in order
to counter the violent, artificial, and totalizing language (and language
systems) of the Khmer Rouge. This speech is collective and polyphonic
in opposition to the purity that characterized the cultural dictates of
Angkar.” 6 The account of the brutal treatment of the prisoners, of the
torture methods, and—in the final part of the film—of the usual place
and manner of execution, is approached with an almost naive attitude
toward the people involved, both perpetrators and victims. To recover
this past, Pahn’s decision to have the former guards reenact their prison
routines proves especially revealing. As Deirdre Boyle points out, these
scenes, which are “neither scripted nor directed and only minimally
staged,” are central to the film because “we witness the past become
present. . . . It is a moment of memory relived” that would never be effec-
tively expressed in an ordinary interview due to its traumatic nature.7
The documentary thus swings between the oral testimony of the protag-
onists and the performative dimension of the reenactments in order to
rescue the victims from oblivion and to offer an ambivalent portrait of
the executioners, providing a strange and awkward balance between
empathy and condemnation.
Eight years later, in 2011, Panh released a new documentary, Duch:
Master of the Forges of Hell, posited as a kind of sequel to S-21. In the
earlier film, both the prison guards and the survivors make frequent ref-
erences to Duch, the prison director, who was charged with ensuring the
effectiveness of the machinery of death and the loyalty of the young
prison guards under him. At that time, Panh was unable to interview
Duch, who had been captured four years earlier. But a few years later
Panh obtained permission and decided to interview Duch in prison in
order to make a film about him. The result exhibits some microhistorical
features, as it places the focus on this singular individual with a detailed
exploration of his years as director of the S-21 prison under the repres-
sive regime of the Khmer Rouge, a role that gives him a certain historical
representativeness, immersing the spectator in the dark history of the
Cambodian genocide.
 1 3 2  R ITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H I CA L N A R R ATI VE

The film is constructed using a strategy similar to that of S-21, as the

central focus is on the interviews with Duch, presented in an austere mise-
en-scène, with numerous frontal shots of the seated interviewee (usually
behind a table). However, this interview is intertwined with the frequent
insertion of three types of brief fragments: Khmer Rouge propaganda
films (most of which were already used in earlier films); interviews with
survivors and prison guards, some of them viewed by Duch himself on a
computer; and reenactments of scenes from the lives of the guards at
S-21. In this way, the film is constructed using overtly intertextual strate-
gies, combining materials and references from Panh’s two earlier docu-
mentaries on the subject, Bophana and S-21.
Despite the importance of the interviews, Panh also makes use of dif-
ferent archival materials for the construction of his film. In addition to
the archival footage of the Khmer Rouge, the filmmaker gives a great
deal of importance to written and photographic documents. The table in
the interview with Duch is covered with reports and photographs that
Duch examines and comments on, for example, checking over his hand-
writing as “proof” of the veracity of his story. Notable among these mate-
rials is Bophana’s mug shot, which appears several times on the table. Panh
expressly compels Duch to refer to the case of Bophana, which he com-
ments on briefly, amplifying the microhistorical echo of Panh’s docu-
mentary about her. In this way, Bophana, S-21, and Duch make up a tril-
ogy, closely linked to the history of the former S-21 prison and the
documentation found there, which gives us access to the history of the
Cambodian genocide through characters who are not deemed important
to the country’s public history. However, in none of these films does
Panh himself appear, either as the filmmaker or as a survivor of the
genocide. This changes in his next film, The Missing Picture, which con-
stitutes this chapter’s main object of study.

THE MISS ING PICTU R E:

THE AUTOBIOGRA PHIC A L T UR N

Rithy Panh’s next exploration of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer

Rouge was not in the form of a film, but a book of memoirs recounting
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H IC AL N A R R ATI VE1 33

his experiences during the years of the regime: L’elimination (2012),

which he wrote with the help of Christophe Bataille.8 This autobiograph-
ical turn was expressed in cinematic form the following year with The
Missing Picture, which received major international recognition.9 The
film was written and directed by Panh, but again with the assistance of
Bataille, who was responsible for writing the voice-over narration. The
Missing Picture is a film with a complex combination of formal and the-
matic layers, characterized by a hybridization of autobiographical and
essayistic approaches: a historical chronicle of 1970s Cambodia and a
deconstruction of the official narrative of the Khmer Rouge, a reflection
on the filmic image as document and on the lack of images to tell a story.
The focus here is on its status as a microhistorical documentary, with a
study of its features as an autobiographical and mnemonic work, an
examination of its critical revision of the Khmer Rouge’s narrative, and,
finally, an analysis of the archival materials used and their relationship
to the “missing picture” that gives the film its title.
In The Missing Picture, the main element of continuity with Panh’s
previous documentaries is the reduced scale of observation, which again
underlines its microhistorical character. The centrality of the proper
name reflects a prosopography from below that clearly echoes Bophana:
A Cambodian Tragedy, but with a more complex structure, based on an
autobiographical premise that emphasizes individual agency as the
means of exploring the past. Moreover, Panh offers a memoir with a
clear essayistic dimension, interweaving his personal experiences with
the official narrative of those years, and exposing the historiographical
problems raised by this confrontation. In this way, the Cambodian film-
maker distances this film from a more typical “biography,” a category
that could be more easily ascribed to Bophana. Applying the distinction
between biography and microhistory posited by Jill Lepore (mentioned
in chapter 3), instead of a biographical perspective that highlights the
unique nature of the individual and his contribution to history, The
Missing Picture is more clearly microhistorical, as it gives the personal
history narrated an exemplary character, in an effort to explain an era
and a society through the individual story.10
Panh’s autobiographical approach, while relying on a more essayistic
treatment, is nevertheless constructed using a fairly classical narrative
framework. The film begins in the present moment of his life, in 2013,
 1 3 4  R ITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H I CA L N A R R ATI VE

when he is about to turn fifty. From a narrative point of view this open-
ing sequence is best understood as a prologue (0’–4’), which is followed
by the main part of the film, covering the period from 1975 to 1979, and a
final section serving as a kind of epilogue (86’–93’).11 In this temporal
framework, the diegetic time of the autobiographical journey follows an
apparently linear chronology, interrupted by external flashbacks clearly
signaled by the voice-over, which reconstruct or evoke moments prior to
the Khmer Rouge regime. Over this narrative structure, Panh introduces
different layers, with an essayistic approach that explores the relation-
ships between his personal memory and the public history, combining
scenes with a historical tone and others that have a more experimental or
dreamlike quality.
Because of the autobiographical nature of the film, personal memory
plays a central role in the remembrance of past events, giving rise to a
creative proposal that can be described as a “memory film” in the most
literal sense of the term.12 The retrospective dimension inherent in all
autobiography is conveyed here, as is common in this type of first-person
film, through the autodiegetic narration of the voice-over, with the
unique feature that it is a narration mediated on two levels, as it has been
written by Panh’s co-writer Bataille and is narrated by the actor Randal
Duoc. Panh brings this first-person voice-over narration into dialogue
with a rich and complex network of visual sources, thereby highlighting
the most characteristic features of memory films, which, according to
María del Rincón, Marta Torregrosa, and myself, can be summed up
using three basic categories: subjectivity, temporal indiscernibility, and
performativity.13
From the very beginning of the narration, these three features are
hinted at, when the voice-over states: “I seek my childhood like a lost
picture. Or rather it seeks me. Is it because I am fifty? Because I’ve seen
troubled times when fear alternates with hope? The memory is there
now, pounding at my temples” (2’). The subjectivity is foregrounded,
with the “I” of the narrator, identified with the filmmaker, at the heart of
the narration right from the beginning. The spectator is thus “sub-
merged” (to echo the metaphor of the waves of the sea, which are shown
at the start and end of the film) in the filmmaker’s mnemonic journey,
which is distanced from any objectivist pretension in its account of those
years of suffering. Throughout the film the voice-over repeats the first
 RITHY PANH’S AU TOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE135

person, this “I/we,” often accompanying it with the verb “remember,”

emphasizing the work of memory again and again. The subjectivity is
thus based on this autodiegetic declaration, in close dialogue with other
film techniques, resulting in a narrative charged with intimacy. In the
final part of the film Panh goes even further to highlight this subjective
dimension, becoming even more detached from the chronological narra-
tion of the events, as reflected in the scene of a session with the psycho-
analyst (85’–87’) and the scene of a burial of a body, repeated in a loop
(91’–93’), which ends the film. The voice-over in this last scene highlights
the identification of the filmmaker/narrator with the invisible protago-
nist who throws dirt over the dead body: “Mourning is difficult. There’s
no end to the burial. . . . Every morning, I worked over that pit. My shovel
hit bones and heads. As for dirt, there is never enough. It’s me they will
kill” (91’). In this way, Panh emphasizes the deep scar that those years
have left on him, a traumatic memory that the filmmaker has trans-
formed into a film narrative of unusual depth.
At the same time, The Missing Picture underscores the intrinsic rela-
tionship between past and present, both through the marked essayistic
style and personal tone of the narration and through the work with
visual materials. From the way Panh reuses the archival footage, which
reverberates in the present with unexpected undertones, to the use of
figurines and dioramas to reconstruct the past, everything points toward
a conception of memory as an active process, in which the past is not
“recovered” but updated in the present, saturating the narrative with a
temporal indiscernibility, as the narrator suggests when he states that
“the memory is there now.” It is an approach that views memory and his-
tory as interconnected, through an understanding—as Geoffrey Cubitt
describes it in a more general context—of “the past as it exists in its cur-
rent awareness, a past constructed through the complex mixture of
reflection and recollection, research and imaginative representation, that
allows us the feeling of conscious retrospection . . . a past that makes
sense for the present.”14 It is remarkable how fitting this quote seems to
describe The Missing Picture in its articulation of memory and history.
Indeed, Panh’s past—his childhood—“seeks him out” in the present, and
it is based on this premise that the filmmaker constructs his intricate
story of the Khmer Rouge regime. It is a premise that effectively locates
the narrative in a time that is more personal than linear, closer to the
 1 3 6  RITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP HI CA L N A R R ATI VE

Greek concept of kairos than to chronos. This intrinsic connection

between past and present, the temporal indiscernibility that is such a
characteristic feature of this memory film, is sustained on a labyrinthine
structure with a Deleuzian flavor, where “memory-images” (to use Henri
Bergson’s expression) ultimately predominate, combining the actual and
the virtual, and the present, the past, and the future.15
Panh never appears physically in the film and his voice is never heard
in the narration (with the sole exception of a diorama in which his par-
ents are watching television, which shows a real interview with Panh on
the television). Nevertheless, he is present not only through the “I” of the
voice-over but also through a figurine that represents him. Although the
Khmer Rouge made the forced laborers wear black clothes, Panh pres-
ents his alter ego wearing a colorful shirt, an effective strategy to make
his figurine recognizable, but also another way of visualizing the inter-
weaving of memory in the revision of the past, which colors the past
moments through their contemporary reconstruction (see figure 5.2).
The figurines are also the most obvious way of giving the narrative a per-
formative dimension—the third main feature posited for any memory
film. Panh provides the first sign of this performative approach by
including scenes where his and his father’s figurines are being made,

FIGURE 5.2 The Missing Picture. Rithy Panh’s figurine, with its colorful shirt, making
him stand out against the black attire of his companions.
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H IC AL N A R R ATI VE1 37

turning the clay into memory. His subsequent use of these figurines is
not limited to placing them in the dioramas representing the more
chronological narrative. He also superimposes them over different kinds
of films, and places them in imaginary or dreamlike territories, thereby
underscoring their performative nature as “producers” of memories in
the mnemonic project posited by the film. This performative dimension
is also evident in the use of photographs, which are discussed in more
detail below. Panh includes only three photographs in his film: the mug
shot of Bophana and two family snapshots with children. None of them
are contextualized, as if they were being intentionally stripped of their
referential function to emphasize their nature as traumatic memory trig-
gers. It is a common approach in this context, as Frances Guerin and
Robert Hallas point out in their study of the image as a witness to his-
torical trauma: “The agency of the material image . . . is grounded in the
performative (rather than constative) function of the act of bearing wit-
ness. Within the context of bearing witness, material images do not
merely depict the historical world, they participate in its transforma-
tion.”16 In the case of the two snapshots, their inclusion exposes their
nature as mnemonic objects that link the filmmaker to his traumatic
past, as surviving remnants of the genocidal storm suffered by his family
and his country in those years. The narration also reinforces this perfor-
mative dimension more explicitly right at the end of the film. After stat-
ing that he has not found the missing picture, the narrator addresses the
spectator directly: “And so I make this picture. . . . I hold it in my hand
like a beloved face. This missing picture I now hand over to you, so that
it never ceases to seek us out” (93’). The film, which nearly ends after this
statement, is thus presented as a shared experience, as a shared traumatic
memory that will haunt us always.17

D E CO NSTRUCTIN G THE OF FICI A L HI STORY OF

THE KHMER ROUGE R EGI ME

The microhistorical character of The Missing Picture is the result of tran-

scending an autobiographical narrative focusing on an individual, so that
its memory work becomes a means of access to historical knowledge. To
 1 3 8  RITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP HI CA L N A R R ATI VE

this end, the change in the scale of observation inherent in the autobio-
graphical perspective is complemented with an explicit reflection on the
historical past that seeks to present Panh’s personal experience as repre-
sentative of the hardships and suffering of the Cambodian people under
the Khmer Rouge regime. Panh approaches this investigation both
through the contrast between the macro- and microhistorical dimen-
sions and through the revision of the ideological discourse of the Khmer
Rouge regime.
On a prima facie reading, The Missing Picture could be understood as
a film that continues Panh’s investigation of the Cambodian genocide,
and in this sense numerous intertextual references to his previous films
can be found. But Panh also wants his film to be accessible to viewers
unfamiliar with what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s, which is why
he includes enough historical context to make his personal experience
understandable. Thus, at the beginning of the film (4’–7’), the filmmaker
provides some historical context, briefly mentioning his memory of the
outbreak of civil war, the victory of the Khmer Rouge, and the forced
deportation of two million people from the cities to the countryside,
beginning with the capital, Phnom Penh, where Panh lived. Throughout
the film other historical details are provided (if only briefly) about the
ruling Angkar party, about its leader Pol Pot, and so on, usually sup-
ported visually with newsreels produced by the regime. However, Panh
goes further than the mere historical contextualization characteristic of
a traditional expository documentary to delve into a more specifically
historiographical exploration, with a critical revision of the ideological
apparatus that sustained the Khmer Rouge regime, including both its
verbal discourse and its representations on film (analyzed below in the
discussion of the use of archival materials). This revision of the discur-
sive practices of the Khmer Rouge contains an obvious deconstructive
intention, although distanced from a radical understanding of this
method as well as from a narrativist approach to history. With a stance
reminiscent of Carlo Ginzburg’s dispute with the theories of Hayden
White, mentioned in chapter 1, Panh acknowledges the constructed
nature of historical representation, but with the cognitive confidence—in
his case, a confidence imbued with a personal urgency—in the ability to
gain access to the past and expose the lie that sustained the oppressive
regime and the genocide it perpetrated.18
 RITHY PANH’S AU TOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE139

Panh’s revisionist perspective on the Khmer Rouge regime pervades

the whole film. There are sections nonetheless where he addresses it spe-
cifically, to refer either to events that could be defined as the regime’s
“public history” or to what can be more strictly described as its ideologi-
cal discourse. The first section where Panh revises the public history
(18’–20’) is a clear example of the complexity of layers of images and
sounds that he brings into play, combining historical analysis, film essay,
and autobiographical narrative. The section begins with the presentation
of the leader Pol Pot and his closest supporters arriving at a party assem-
bly. The images, which have an official and triumphalist tone, are under-
mined by jarring electronic music, which, however, gives way to the sing-
ing of the socialist anthem “The Internationale.” The two pieces of music
are ultimately blended together, and the image switches from the Khmer
Rouge with their fists in the air to other, radically opposed images: a
diorama of a school in ruins, followed by archive images of the S-21
prison, with its torture cells, filmed after the fall of the regime. Mean-
while, the filmmaker offers a rather cold account of how all that was left
in the empty capital was the Central Committee and the S-21 prison,
about which he explains: “Here they whip, they electrocute, they cut,
they force-feed excrement, they get confessions. It all starts with purity
and ends with hate” (20’).
A second, similar sequence begins at minute 38. After describing how
in his childhood he used to like going to film shoots and studios, Panh
talks about how everyone in the film industry was murdered or deported.
The new industry that replaced it only made propaganda—“A Khmer
Rouge film is always a slogan,” he says—and its only actor is Pol Pot: “He
is the Revolution. His myth must be forged.” Using footage from official
newsreels, he explains how Pol Pot’s myth was constructed, in a blend of
orthodox communism and native Cambodian customs: “It’s Marx and
Rousseau, integral communism and the pure, original world. A perfect
society.” In this perfect society there is no private property and “the new
people”—referring to the urban, educated population—must be re-
educated in the rice fields or eliminated. This sequence has a less com-
plex composition than the previous one, as it is sustained mainly by offi-
cial newsreels with commentary by the voice-over, although there is a
brief ironic digression with a reference to the rural workers who joined
the Khmer Rouge, who are shown in a photograph that was subsequently
 1 4 0  RITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP HI CA L N A R R ATI VE

used on the regime’s new currency: “They look good on the new coun-
try’s banknotes, which will never be used.”
A third section, no longer quite so homogeneous, can be found from
minutes 68 to 76. In this segment, there are three moments when Panh
again explicitly revises the official narrative of the Khmer Rouge regime.
It begins with a visit by Chinese leaders (68’), supported visually by the
typical official newsreels, but with a voice-over that tinges the images
with an unquestionably ironic hue: “The great leap forward [the slogan of
the Khmer Rouge], is it not wonderful? Is not each day a celebration? Is
not Kampuchea succeeding, through purity, through void, where the
Chinese Revolution failed? Is not Kampuchea an extraordinary labora-
tory of ideology?” Shortly after this (72’), Panh describes his hard work at
the hospital, and here he inserts a new reference to the communist para-
noia of the regime, again deconstructing the official images shown in the
scene: “The Khmer Rouge have banned capitalist medicine. They chop
roots. They boil them. They experiment with traditional and therefore
revolutionary remedies.” And a little later (79’), he offers a reflection on
the source of the conflict, in response to those who explained the Cam-
bodian genocide in terms of a kind of social conformism that could be
associated with a Buddhist mentality and its grim acceptance of fate.
Panh critiques this explanation bitterly: “How do you revolt when all
you’ve got are black clothes and a spoon, when you are lost, when you are
hungry?” And he offers an unusually caustic reply: “Where were those
fine minds then? In their books? In their lofty ideas? Here it is not karma,
not religion that kills. It’s ideology.” Panh accompanies these words with
dioramas of deported workers making their way through the jungle to
their new workplace, as if to underscore the bluntness of his answer.
In this critical revision of the communist regime, Panh examines
more explicitly the propagandistic rhetoric of the Khmer Rouge, which
formed an inevitable part of his years of forced labor. Practically from
the beginning of the film, the narrator cites slogans from those years,
and quotes or paraphrases the Khmer Rouge’s propaganda. The inclu-
sion of these quotes serves an informative function (it is what they heard
at the labor camps), but its main purpose is deconstructive, a purpose
that clearly intensifies in certain sequences. The first such sequence
begins in minute 7, after an account of the fall of Phnom Penh and the
deportation of its inhabitants, when the narrator exclaims the official
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H ICAL N A R R ATI VE1 41

slogan: “Long live the glorious April 17th, a day overflowing with joy,”
while we see aerial images of the capital in those years, with its streets
empty. This strategy is repeated in the subsequent account of their depor-
tation. A paraphrase of the communist rhetoric of the new regime is
occasionally mixed with more exact quotes of their slogans, such as when
the narrator asserts, after describing how they were separated and
dressed in uniforms: “We are the new people: bourgeois, intellectuals
and capitalists, to be reeducated, to be destroyed. You must embrace the
proletarian condition!” (10’). The sequence continues with a certain
rhythmic structure, with further alternations between paraphrase and
slogan: “The Angkar takes care of you all, comrades! Brothers and sisters,
fathers and mothers! The Angkar is the organization. It is all. It is every-
one. It is the young Khmer Rouge, the village chief, the head of the tor-
ture center, and Pol Pot” (11’). The paraphrase is only apparent, as can be
seen, because it includes the deconstruction of this official discourse,
through the juxtaposition of re-education and destruction, or the inser-
tion of the torturer into an apparently fraternal and inclusive discourse.
Meanwhile, the visuals show dioramas of the deportation process and
scenes of forced labor, combined with newsreels showing multitudes of
people marching around a collective work site, like human ants. The
reality of poverty and hunger depicted in the dioramas repeatedly
exposes the falseness of the slogans, such as the declaration “Long live
Democratic Kampuchea, a prodigious leap forward!” over a diorama of
forced labor. The voice-over continues delving into the ideological dis-
course until it becomes explicitly dark, underpinned once again by the
same kind of jarring music: “Soon there will be no more faces, no more
friends, no more love, no more father and mother. Soon there will be no
more emotion, and even words will be transformed. Each being will be a
revolutionary, or fertilizer for the rice fields” (12’).
Another section of the film with an intense revision of the ideological
discourse begins in minute 63, with a more frontal attack on its rhetori-
cal construction. It begins with images from a newsreel of young people
gathering rice, with serene, smiling expressions, leading the narrator to
declare: “At last I see the Revolution they promised us. It exists only on
film” (63’). The newsreel continues, showing the workers threshing the
rice and loading it for shipment to an unknown destination, while the
Cambodian population suffered famine, inciting the narrator’s open
 1 4 2  R ITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP HI CA L N A R R ATI VE

complaint against the Khmer Rouge: “Did they not know? Did they not
see? Could they not act? Does the truth lie in the glorious slogans? Or in
these pictures that are not missing?” (65’). Once again, the contrast
between the rhetoric of the regime and the ghastly reality is exposed.
This contrast is even sharper in the next scene, which shows Pol Pot
giving a speech—which is translated literally— on the wonders of the
collectivist cooperatives, who enjoy “a perfect existence in terms of food,
health, sanitation, culture, studies and education.” Panh begins to ques-
tion this description by juxtaposing it with images of the antlike workers
at the public construction site, underscored by unsettling background
music, before coming right out and contradicting it in the voice-over:
“The reality is this: Straw huts. Drought. Exhaustion. Hunger. Neon
lights to work by night. Speakers blaring slogans. Ideology was rampant
in the fields” (66’–67’). This refutation is reinforced by the new footage
that illustrates it, completely at odds with the official rhetoric, with work-
ers in the foreground trudging along slowly as if in exhaustion.19
Later in the film, there is one more significant scene in the decon-
struction of the regime’s discourse. After describing more hardships and
telling how it became harder to survive, Panh begins to remember what
life had once been like around the central market in the city, with its
abundance of food and goods, its hustle and bustle, and its laughter. The
filmmaker illustrates this with archival footage from those years before
the Khmer Rouge, showing a Phnom Penh full of life, into which once
again he inserts his figurine as a visual mnemonic link. Then, in an
abrupt leap, we cut to the same street, empty after the regime change.
The contrast is underscored by the narrator: “It’s the same street, lively,
then empty.” And over this graphic image of desolation and ruin, he con-
cludes with a sentence that somehow sums up the scene: “I remember
this world so imperfect and human. ‘2000 years of slavery,’ said Pol Pot”
(83’). It is a terse sentence that resounds like an anguished cry, despite
being pronounced in the narrator’s usual emotionally detached tone,
making this scene to exude sadness in its gaze on the past while denounc-
ing the ideological rhetoric of the communist regime.
As noted above, this deconstruction of the ideological framework of
the Khmer Rouge is supported by the narrator’s frequent use of irony.
This strategy, which is often associated more with fiction film,20 proves
highly effective in Panh’s hands, thanks in part to Bataille’s carefully
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H ICAL N A R R ATI VE1 43

crafted narration. Irony is present in much of the juxtaposition of dis-

course and reality analyzed here, exposing the emptiness of the propa-
ganda slogans, through both the verbal discourse and intonation of the
voice-over and their contrast with the visuals. Sometimes, however, this
ironic contrast is made especially obvious. One example can be found in
a scene showing a diorama of an indoctrination session for the deport-
ees, where the voice-over provides a detailed commentary on all the tri-
umphalist rhetoric of the Khmer Rouge heralding a perfect world and a
society without classes, and concludes: “Flying over this utopia is a red
flag, and of course this truth: Comrade, you are so very free!” The con-
trast is immediate and openly ironic when he continues: “For now, you
must obey, dig ceaselessly, move earth, move rock” (15’). Visually, an aer-
ial pan shot from a diorama of well-cultivated fields, paved roads, and
people on bicycles shifts to an adjacent one—separated by a wall that is
more symbolic than real, separating the ideology from the reality—
where we see the forced labor of the deportees, digging and transporting
earth. Another scene with an unusual ironic contrast, which would even
be comical if it were not still referring to the harsh reality of the deport-
ees, shows the “re-education” of automobiles (42’–43’). It begins with a
diorama showing a car being transported over rice paddies by eight
workers and placed in the paddies to transport water; this is followed by
archival footage showing an actual car being reused to channel water
from a river up into the irrigation canals of the rice paddies. Mean-
while, the voice-over declares: “The Angkar never uses any object from
imperialist or feudal society. Capitalist automobiles confess their crimes.
They too are reeducated. These cars work toward edifying the new coun-
try” (43’).

T H E USE OF ARCHIVAL MAT ER I A L A N D

T H E SEA RCH FOR THE MISSI N G P I C T U RE

In The Missing Picture, Panh faces the inevitable problem of the absence
of images of the genocide. In this sense, his work runs into the same
obstacles faced by a microhistorian dealing with the investigation of
cases that, by their very nature, lack the kind of archival support that the
 1 4 4  R ITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP HI CA L N A R R ATI VE

events examined in macrohistory normally have. There are no images of

the mass deportations or of the systematic extermination carried out by
the Khmer Rouge. Nor does Panh have a family archive to support his
memories, apart from a few childhood snapshots. His main primary
source therefore consists of his personal memories, which are expressed
most directly in the voice-over narration. To compensate for the absence
of more specific archival material, Panh makes use of footage from dif-
ferent sources. He often uses newsreels, most of them filmed by the com-
munist regime as part of its propaganda machinery. He also uses footage
filmed prior to the victory of the Khmer Rouge, showing the capital and
its central market (and the Apollo 11 expedition), or taken after their vic-
tory, like the brief images of the S-21 prison. Occasionally, he inserts
scenes from two fiction films: Apsara (1966) and La joie de vivre (1969).
Panh works with this archival footage to create a rich network of rela-
tionships, in an effort to give an account of the Cambodian genocide. In
a certain sense, his approach falls within the parameters posited by Carlo
Ginzburg for the work of the microhistorian, mentioned in previous
chapters, when he argues for a combination of erudition and imagina-
tion to fill in the lacunae with documentation that is contiguous in space
and time, in order to construct a better picture of what the era being
studied would have been like.21 The difference in this case lies in the fact
that the protagonist of the story is the filmmaker, whose memories serve
as its guiding thread. But this does not save the filmmaker/historian
from facing a serious challenge in constructing a convincing and bal-
anced story of those terrible years, evoking the pain of a whole nation
through his microhistorical narrative.
Much of the archival material that appears in The Missing Picture had
already been used by Panh in previous documentaries, thereby creating
an audiovisual conversation that expands with each new film. Among
these reused archival images, the most symbolic is, again, the mug shot
of Bophana, an icon of his lifelong research on the Cambodian genocide.
It is mentioned only briefly, as a visual response to the investigation into
why the Khmer Rouge took pictures of the victims: “What would the
picture of a dead man reveal? I prefer this anonymous young woman,
who defies the camera, and the eye of her torturer, and still looks straight
at us” (21’). It is an intertextual reference that is understood only by view-
ers familiar with his work; yet even without this context it is significant
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H ICAL N A R R ATI VE1 45

in itself, as it is one of only three photographs of victims of the genocide

shown in the film, and the only one taken in an extermination camp. The
filmmaker does not delve further into the exploration of the photo-
graphic archives of the regime’s repressive machinery, not only because
he has already done so in his previous films S-21 and Duch, but because
this film traces the narrative thread of his personal journey, and he him-
self never suffered incarceration in one of the regime’s prisons.
To compensate for the lack of images available, Panh proposes a strat-
egy that becomes a defining feature of his film, to the point that it even
features on the film’s poster: the use of figurines placed in dioramas. This
approach places Panh’s film in the tradition of animated documentaries,
albeit far from the realist animation techniques that have made docu-
mentaries like Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) so popular. These
dioramas exhibit an apparent rigidity that gives them the aspect of tab-
leaux vivants, theoretically quite distinct from an imitative realist aes-
thetic. However, Panh constructs an elaborate mise-en-scène around
these dioramas, with a detailed shot-by-shot breakdown, supported by
an evocative autobiographical voice-over, which gives these representa-
tions an authenticity of great persuasive force. In fact, the effect is so con-
vincing that the footage from the films of the Khmer Rouge, despite the
indexical quality of its images, seems artificial and lifeless compared to
the powerful realist effect of the dioramas. There is a similar contrast
when the dioramas are juxtaposed against other types of footage, as can
be seen in one of the most curious scenes in the film, when Panh tells the
story of the moon landing to the Khmer Rouge guards. What is surpris-
ing here is that the filmmaker illustrates this story with the iconic (televi-
sion) images of the Apollo 11 mission, including Neil Armstrong’s leg-
endary first step on the surface of the moon. These images, which still
have a strong impact today based on their indexical nature, acquire
something more like an eerie, ghostlike quality here due to their para-
doxical contrast with the “reality” of the suffering depicted in the diora-
mas, and to their connection to the dreams of the teenage Panh, who
imagined himself stepping on the moon alongside Armstrong. The strat-
egy of the figurines also gives the filmmaker considerable freedom to
represent the past, as Panh moves fluidly between the past that functions
as the frame story—1975 to 1979—and the past prior to the Khmer Rouge,
shown in various external flashbacks. It also allows him to construct
 1 4 6  RITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H I CA L N A R R ATI VE

dreamlike scenes, like the scene of his brother or his cousins flying away,
as well as more essayistic scenes, like the scene that sets up an imaginary
dialogue with his parents, or the scene located in what looks like a psy-
choanalyst’s office, where he is surrounded by all his loved ones.
Panh quite often combines the figurines visually with archival foot-
age, constructing complex images that allow him to explore the relation-
ships between memory, history, and archives. The filmmaker inserts the
figurines into the filmic image through an obvious superimposition, cre-
ating a collage in which the photographic status of the image is fused
with the artisanal dimension of the figurine in a hybrid expressive
regime that highlights the constructed nature of the image.22 Panh devel-
ops a range of variations of these hybrid images, with superimposed lan-
guages and time frames, through the visual fusion of dioramas, snap-
shots, and newsreels, with extraordinary expressive complexity in some
sequences. One of these scenes that stands out for its tragic conclusion is
the one recounting the death of three children—Panh’s cousins—at the
labor camp (47’–48’). In a particularly moving scene, we learn about their
deaths through the voice-over, while the images show their figurines
covered in a white cloth, like a kind of shroud, over which a snapshot
of the three children appears (see figure 5.3), followed by a shot of their

FIGURE 5.3 The Missing Picture. A snapshot of the three children whose death has just
been narrated, superimposed over the cloth covering their figurines.
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H IC AL N A R R ATI VE1 47

figurines flying freely in an open sky. As Sánchez-Biosca explains, the

photographic image of Panh’s cousins acquires a redemptive value, as a
kind of “redemption through the image,” whereby “a recovered child-
hood emerges as a sort of resurrection not only of the little girl, but of a
vanished world.”23 Panh uses a similar strategy in one of the external
flashbacks, introduced explicitly by the voice-over: “I return to the past.
To all those who died. My sisters, my brothers, my cousins, my parents”
(58’). Over the dioramas of the family house with all its inhabitants
appears the picture of the three children shown in the scene described
above, followed by another snapshot with five children, and archival
footage of soldiers and people in the street projected over the facade of
the house (see figure 5.4). This blend of expressive languages might be
considered reminiscent of the ending to the animated documentary
Waltz with Bashir or Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, both of which
conclude with indexical images. Here, however, the two registers are not
used consecutively, but are hybridized through the visual superimposi-
tion and blending of temporalities, creating genuine Deleuzian crystal-
images in a highly effective filmic representation of personal memory.
This can also be seen in two other scenes including hybrid images, both
located in the final part of the film. In these scenes, Panh uses previously

FIGURE 5.4 The Missing Picture. Images of Khmer Rouge soldiers projected on the
facade of the diorama of the family house.
 1 4 8  RITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H I CA L N A R R ATI VE

shown archival footage of the deportees working at a public construction

site, now projected onto two different dioramas: the psychoanalyst’s
office with Panh lying on a couch (91’) and another scene of childhood
memories (74’–75’). This last scene, in its brevity, exhibits a remarkable
semantic complexity. Without a voice-over introduction, the story moves
again to the family home, the music turns joyful, and the dioramas are
filled with adults and children. But night comes, and projected onto the
facade of the house we see the footage of the deportees working. Mean-
while, the narrator’s voice takes on an especially evocative tone: “In the
middle of life, childhood returns, sweet and bitter, with its pictures.
Childhood as drowning. Childhood as a question: How is it that I am
here? Why couldn’t I have helped my loved ones more? Already in child-
hood, death is present” (75’). The present of the narrator meditates on the
childhood evoked by the house, cut short by the rise of the Khmer Rouge
and by the years of forced labor: three time frames fused in another dis-
play of the effective temporal indiscernibility that characterizes the
exploration of personal memory, contained in this brief sequence that
synthesizes the core issues of The Missing Picture with poetic mastery.
There is still one more scene in which Panh briefly makes use of the
hybridization of dioramas and indexical images. This one shows his par-
ents in a diorama, watching Panh himself being interviewed on televi-
sion, talking about Duch (83’). It is a unique moment, with a certain air of
mise-en-abyme; the first scene in which the filmmaker appears, in an
intertextual reference to his filmography, which is also commented on
self-consciously by his parents (as figurines):

The father: Our son sure jabbers now. On and on he rambles. At least
he’s good with words.
The mother: You’d rather he be a teacher, like you. But it’s our story
he’s filming. That’s us.

The father then goes on to criticize the lack of reference to the context
of poverty before the war that partly justified the rise of the Khmer
Rouge, which is then explained by the son/narrator to briefly contex-
tualize this earlier stage of history. Nevertheless, it is still curious that
the only appearance of the filmmaker’s image should occur in such a
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H IC AL N A R R ATI VE1 49

self-referential way as this, once again working with the hybridization of

temporalities and expressive registers.
The alternative or hybrid strategies used to make up for the absence of
images ultimately point to the core of this film, which is effectively
expressed in its title. Panh poses numerous questions and reflections in
relation to this missing picture, which is in fact open to various interpre-
tations, as suggested by Stéphane Bou, who proposes six possible mean-
ings.24 Without delving here into a detailed breakdown of those mean-
ings, the question is worth further consideration, as in a certain way it
encompasses all the other issues touched on in The Missing Picture. It is
no accident that the film begins by showing piles of tangled film rolls.
These give the impression of being abandoned images, among which
perhaps the picture sought by the filmmaker can be found. A similar
situation reappears later in the film (76’), when a pair of anonymous
hands takes some rolls of old, rusted film out of some canisters, their
images literally lost.25 Panh thus starts with this direct reference to the
materiality of film, which can fall into oblivion without the necessary
preservation and cataloging, with the consequent loss of the images.
The next level of interpretation given the most attention in the film is
that of the absence of images of the genocide. This is expressed tersely by
the narrator near the beginning of the film, while we are shown a
diorama with the transportation of the deportees: “Phnom Penh’s depor-
tation is a missing picture” (9’). In fact, this is one of the film’s main
threads of continuity, the one that compels Panh to make use of diora-
mas and to work with the supplementary materials analyzed above (pro-
paganda newsreels, etc.). Yet Panh also gives specific attention to this
absence of images of the genocide in several scenes in the film. One of
the most explicit occurs when the narrator refers to the fact that the
Khmer Rouge used to photograph the executions, after which he says: “I
look for this picture. If at last I should find it I could not show it, of
course” (21’). On other occasions, his references acquire a tone of com-
plaint, like a mute cry against the silence imposed about the genocide.
One example of this is when he describes the hardships, the hunger, and
the disease they suffered, and finally asks: “Who filmed the sick people?
Who filmed the pagodas turned hospices? The maggot-eaten knee of my
bunk neighbor? Or the young woman who can’t deliver, who screams all
 1 50  R ITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H I CA L N A R R ATI VE

night, alone, hitting her belly, to death?” (70’). The images that accom-
pany these questions echo them in a way, as we see the craftsman carving
one of the figurines, which will make up for what nobody actually
filmed.26 His complaints take on a broader dimension on two other occa-
sions. In the first, he recalls the moments when a plane passed overhead
and he asked whether they might see them and help them: “Will it para-
chute a camera to me? So the world will know at last?” Then he concludes
with resignation: “The missing picture: that’s us” (46’). His lament becomes
more embittered when he addresses the intellectuals of the West, some of
whom very publicly supported the Khmer Rouge: “In Paris or elsewhere,
those who loved our slogans, those who read books, have they seen these
pictures? Or were they missing?” (57’).
The absence of images of the genocide is presented as a denunciation,
but also as a framework for another key level of interpretation: the auto-
biographical level. The missing picture is also the one of a lost childhood,
which, as the voice-over stated earlier, comes back as a haunting image
that pervades the traumatic memory of those years. Panh asserts this
simply at the beginning of the film: “In the middle of life, childhood
returns. . . . I seek my childhood like a lost picture” (2’). This opening
reference is echoed explicitly in a scene mentioned previously that
appears in the final part of the film, where the narrator repeats it in part,
adding new nuances—“childhood as drowning, childhood as a question”
(75’)—while we see archival footage of the deportees working, projected
on the family house. It is therefore no longer a question of the desire to
recover a material image that could show what they suffered, but the
longing for a biographical period that the war and the Khmer Rouge cut
short—marked, furthermore, by the pain over the death of loved ones,
parents, brothers, sisters, and other relatives who died during the years
of the genocidal regime. This is expressed a little later in the film: “It’s not
a picture of loved ones I seek. I want to touch them. Their voice is miss-
ing, so I won’t tell. I want to leave it all, leave my language, my country, in
vain, and my childhood returns” (86’). The poetic tone points to a com-
plex blend of temporalities that are also reinforced by the image, with
that same temporal indiscernibility that characterizes earlier moments
of the film. The narrator’s reflection is now visually associated with the
figurine of the grown-up Panh lying on the couch in the psychoanalyst’s
office, which is replaced in a dissolve by his figurine as a teenager with
 R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H ICAL N A R R ATI VE1 51

his colorful shirt. From there we go on to contemporary images of a child

and an adult—who might function as his own alter ego in his childhood
and adulthood—walking over arid terrain, while the narrator adds:
“Now it’s the boy who seeks me out. I see him. He wants to speak to me.
But words are hard to find” (87’).
Searching is a constant throughout the film: for the missing picture of
the genocide, for the lost childhood, for the dead loved ones. It is thus
hardly surprising that Panh should end his narration by referring to this
search: “Of course I haven’t found the missing picture. I looked for it, in
vain. . . . And so I make this picture. I look at it. I cherish it. I hold it in
my hand like a beloved face. This missing picture, I now hand over to
you, so that it never ceases to seek us out” (92’). The film is a search that
he shares with the viewers, in a thought-provoking echo of History and
Memory, when Rea Tajiri gives the film to her mother as a gift to heal the
gaps in her memory. Rithy Panh ends The Missing Picture in a similar
way, but with an appeal to the spectator. In this way, the filmmaker fore-
grounds the performative nature of his mnemonic enterprise, construct-
ing his film as a personal process of understanding a past era, which he
then shares with viewers so that they can understand the suffering of
the Cambodian people and the senselessness of the evil perpetrated by
the blind ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime.
 6
IDENTITIES AND CONFLICTS IN
ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

Israel: A Home Movie, For My Children, My Terrorist,

My Land Zion, and A World Not Ours

T
he history of Israel and Palestine is characterized by a complex
network of conflicting relationships, wars, and peace efforts that
continue today with no sign of a conclusion. This troubled his-
tory has been reflected in numerous documentaries made mainly by
Israeli filmmakers, but also by Palestinians. Some of these films focus on
the current situation, others seek to explain the public history of the
region (its “macrohistory”), and still others offer approaches from a
microhistorical perspective. In this chapter, I analyze films that fall into
this last category, exploring the microhistorical approaches they take to
the history of these peoples and the conflicts they continue to face.
In the diverse context of Israeli and Palestinian documentary produc-
tion, it is not always easy to discern which films reflect a microhistorical
approach, as there are many that deal with contemporary history that
seem to fit into this category, since their perspectives bear little relation
to public history. Two such possibilities are the well-known films Happy
Birthday, Mr. Mograbi (Avi Mograbi, 1999) and Waltz with Bashir (Ari
Folman, 2008), although on closer analysis neither of these films seems
to qualify as microhistorical. With Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi, Avi
Mograbi has made a very personal film about Israel that is rather hard to
classify. Taking as its premise the country’s fiftieth anniversary, the film
adopts an essay style that ultimately dominates the narrative and pushes
the historiographical perspective into the background. In Waltz with
Bashir, Ari Folman presents a more explicit exploration of the past,
 IDENTITIES AND CONFLICTS IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE153

focusing on the Lebanon War of 1982. Based on interviews conducted by

the filmmaker, mostly with soldiers like him who took part in the war,
the film is more about memory and trauma than about history, made
with the visual freedom offered by animation, with its versatility for
changing from a realist to a dreamlike register, and from present to mem-
ory. Although the film is based on the testimonies of anonymous soldiers
recalling the war, Folman puts the focus less on the task of recounting the
past than on the inner wounds caused by the war, on its protagonists’
traumas, repressed memories, and processes of mnemonic recovery.1
Falling more clearly into the category of microhistory are the films
that are analyzed in detail in this chapter: Israel: A Home Movie, For My
Children, My Terrorist, My Land Zion, and A World Not Ours. Although
they differ in various ways from the most paradigmatic cases of a micro-
historical approach, all certainly offer a meaningful historiographical
reflection articulated chiefly around the tension between macro- and
microhistorical scales of observation. In a manner similar to the films on
Japanese American incarceration analyzed in chapter 4, these five films
show how different microhistorical approaches can examine the same
historical events, although the historical period in this case is much
broader, running from the 1930s through to the start of the twenty-first
century. The chapter begins with an analysis of Israel: A Home Movie, a
collective portrait created using different collections of home movies. It
then turns the focus to microhistorical explorations conducted from
autobiographical perspectives, beginning with an examination of the
diaristic approaches of some films dealing with similar issues, followed
by a close analysis of the documentaries of two filmmakers with some
significant parallels: Michal Aviad’s For My Children and Yulie Cohen’s
My Terrorist and My Land Zion. The chapter concludes by considering
the Palestinian context, with an analysis of A World Not Ours, a chroni-
cle by Mahdi Fleifel that introduces the spectator to the microhistory of
a Palestinian refugee camp.

IS RAEL: A HOME M OV I E

Israeli documentary productions dealing with the country’s contempo-

rary history do not generally make use of home movies as an archival
 1 54  ID E NTITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

source. The most notable exception to this can be found in the film Israel:
A Home Movie (2012).2 Directed by Eliav Lilti and Arik Bernstein, this
film offers an overview of the contemporary history of Israel from the
1930s through to the late 1970s—the historical period when home movies
were filmed using small-gauge cameras. Apart from a nonhistorical pro-
logue and epilogue, the film follows a chronological order, with onscreen
captions indicating different years. The visuals are comprised mainly of
home movies and, more occasionally, amateur films.3 The soundtrack
consists of voice-over testimonies by the people featured in the footage,
often accompanied by extradiegetic music. With these elements, the film
might be expected to constitute a typical case of a microhistorical docu-
mentary constructed as a collective story, in the style of Something Strong
Within. Indeed, this is what Bernstein seems to suggest: “What we’re
showing is an alternative way of storytelling, an alternative historiogra-
phy.” 4 However, Lilti and Bernstein’s film seems more ambiguous, as
revealed by an analysis of the scale of observation adopted and the role
given to the home movies in the film.
The scale of observation seems more clearly microhistorical at the
beginning of the film, as the first years (up to 1938) focus on family sto-
ries, especially those of the Zaltzmans and the Moussaieffs. But, after
1938, this focus begins to blur somewhat, taken over by scenes related
more to Israel’s public history, referring to the wars of those years (the
War of Independence, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War), but also
to other events, such as Independence Day parades (of which three are
shown: 1948, 1967, and 1968). This results in an abundance of images of
soldiers, tanks, transit camps, Palestinians leaving their homes, and so
on, which are often included without any specific connection to the nar-
ration of the testimonies, although all were supposedly filmed by home
moviemakers. This is why a sequence like the one showing the snowfall
of 1951 (38’), which of course caught the interest of the home moviemak-
ers, stands out as something of an exception to the general structure of a
film that seems otherwise much more concerned with following the
country’s political events. The end result is somewhat ambiguous in
terms of its historiographical intention, due to the hybrid quality result-
ing from the conflation of the microhistorical perspective derived from
the use of home movies and amateur films (and the voice-over commen-
tary by the people featured in it) and the macrohistorical character of
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 55

many of the events shown in the film. This hybridization is more visible
in certain sequences that reflect a singular mixture of scales of observa-
tion, which warrants a more detailed analysis here.
The most interesting instances of this hybridization of scales occur
when macrohistory interferes in the home moviemakers’ “domestic”
scenes. One example can be found in a sequence referring to the Altalena
Affair, when the Irgun paramilitary group brought a ship filled with
fighters and weapons to Israel in 1948, leading to a brief armed conflict
between Irgun’s forces and the newly created Israel Defense Forces, and
ending with the ship running aground on the shores of Tel Aviv. The
documentary includes some home movies of the Zaltzman family (25’)
showing the mother and a young daughter bathing at the beach with the
grounded ship, the Altalena, looming in the background, in a striking
visual contrast between scales of observation within the same frame.
Meanwhile, two daughters explain the episode and argue about whether
they went there merely to swim at the beach or because their father
wanted to give them a history lesson, while the home movie seems to
support the first opinion.
Later in the film, there is a section dedicated to showing the immigra-
tion of Diaspora Jews to the new State of Israel, presented mainly through
the stories of three different families: one from Yemen, one from Iraq,
and one from South Africa. The home movies and the voice-overs by
people featured in them recounting their memories give this section a
clear microhistorical tone, although its brevity prevents a more in-depth
development of this historiographical approach based on these family
stories. The story of the Iraqi family (35’–36’) is the most powerful, as,
despite its brevity, we hear the testimonies of four family members, con-
veying an ambiguous message, as the images in Iraq show them happy
and with a very comfortable lifestyle, while the testimonies reflect differ-
ent perspectives on the immigration experience. While one family mem-
ber asserts that “we had a good life, until we decided to go to Israel; then
things got bad,” another explains that “I wanted to come to Israel, and I
had no choice.”
In the section covering the period after Israel’s seizure of additional
Palestinian territories in the Six-Day War, the documentary includes
two sequences that also reflect this hybridization of scales very effec-
tively. The first is Miriam Lulu’s wedding, shown through the traditional
 1 56  ID E NTITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

images of bride and groom before and after the ceremony (54’–56’). What
made this wedding unique was that it was the first to be held in the Cave
of Machpelah, which had just been reclaimed by the Jews after two thou-
sand years, generating so much excitement that the wedding turned into
something of a national event. The sequence that follows, about Jews vis-
iting the newly occupied territories, is even more interesting and unset-
tling (56’–57’). Here the travelogue tone typical of many home movies is
mixed with the frequent appearance of military images: a tank, projec-
tiles, a cemetery for Syrian soldiers, and so on. The voice-over commen-
tary underscores the singular nature of the situation: “We went to the
territories, but it wasn’t comfortable. People weren’t friendly.”
In two other segments, this blending of scales appears even more
explicitly. The first is in the section about the Yom Kippur War, which
begins with a group of friends on a trip to Ras Muhammad (on the
southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula), who happen to see (and film) an
Egyptian MiG flying overhead, shot down moments later by an Israeli
Phantom (71’). This is how the group discovers that war has just broken
out, prompting them to leave the campsite quickly to get back home and
enlist in the army, as the home moviemaker recounts in the voice-over.
The other segment consists of home movies filmed by Udi Dayan, son of
the well-known military and political leader Moshe Dayan. Here the
hybridization is even more obvious, with a case that is also relatively typ-
ical: the portrayal of a public person, Moshe Dayan, through home mov-
ies, with the novelty that they are also commented on by his son Udi in a
voice-over. Of the assortment of scenes included here, the most interest-
ing in this context is the one where Udi shows a busy market where pho-
tographs of his father are displayed (hanging up on stalls, stuck to weigh-
ing scales, etc.) after the Six-Day War, when he was at the height of his
popularity (63’; see figure 6.1).
The combination of the home movies and the voice-over commentary
amplifies the hybridization of historiographical scales in diverse ways. A
primary marker of the home movies is provided by deictic expressions—
like the typical “that’s me”—which anchor the images in a specific time
and space, linking them explicitly to the person speaking in the voice-
over. This enhances their air of authenticity by eliminating their ano-
nymity, often serving to introduce the home moviemaker. A new layer of
meaning is added when the commentary provides the historical context
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 57

FIGURE 6.1 Israel: A Home Movie. An image from Udi Dayan’s home movies, when
his father, Moshe Dayan, was at the peak of his popularity after the Six-Day War.

necessary to better understand the home movies. In this sense, it is

highly significant that this commentary often reflects the dreams of the
speaker at the time the footage was taken, sometimes with a connotation
of disappointment resulting from the passage of time and the realization
that the conflict is still ongoing. This is evident in various comments
about the years before independence, when Arabs and Jews lived together
in relative harmony; and in the remarks made in relation to different
wars, especially the Six-Day War: “We were sure it would be the last war,”
or “I thought we were starting a new life.” One of the most self-conscious
of such comments is made by the journalist Benya Binnun, in the
sequence on the three-day march through the occupied territories, mas-
terfully put together by Lilti and Bernstein and their editors Roni Kli-
mowski, Avigail Avshalom-Dahan, and Tania Schwartz. Binnun high-
lights the sense of celebration and recalls the friendly, smiling attitude of
the Arabs—about which he muses “Could it have been different?”—but
 1 58  ID E N TITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

then shows the shock that the occupation represented for the Arabs,
expressed by one Palestinian interviewed as “a knife put in our heart”
(62’). It is not just this statement but images like the one of a Palestinian
tilling his land while Israeli soldiers march past along an adjacent road
that deconstruct the ingenuousness of the “Could it have been differ-
ent?,” giving the whole sequence a strong ambivalence (see figure 6.2).
Despite this interesting hybridization of scales of observation, Israel: A
Home Movie blurs another of the basic features of the microhistorical
approach, that is, the centrality of human agency, which, together with the
microscale of observation, generally entails that the historical investiga-
tion focuses on an individual or a family. While it is true that this feature
is also absent from the film Something Strong Within, analyzed in chap-
ter 4, which offers a collective portrait of Japanese Americans incarcerated
during World War II based on various collections of home movies, the
absence of focus on a single individual or family in that film was compen-
sated for by the portrait of a highly unique historical event, with similar

FIGURE 6.2 Israel: A Home Movie. Israeli soldiers marching in the newly occupied
territories after the Six-Day War, while a Palestinian works on his land.
 IDENTITIES AND CONFLICTS IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE159

characteristics for all the people incarcerated, and restricted to a limited

time period of three to four years. In Israel: A Home Movie, there is also an
emphasis on the personal and familial perspective of the home moviemak-
ers, who are also for the most part unknown individuals outside the public
sphere. But the fact that the documentary covers a historical period of sev-
eral decades and makes use of such a large number of witnesses has the
effect of blurring the centrality of human agency. As many as forty-two
different people are mentioned by name in the captions accompanying the
voice-over testimonies, leaving no time to explore any of them in depth,
resulting in a kaleidoscopic view that makes the film quite distinct from a
typical microhistorical investigation. There are certainly a few participants
who receive a little more attention, such as Tzfira Eyal (Zaltzman), whose
name appears in the titles on seven occasions, making her the dominant
narrator for the 1930s and 1940s. In the three decades after that, Benya Bin-
nun’s name also appears on five occasions, giving him a relatively promi-
nent position. But none of the individuals featured are given sufficient con-
tinuity to develop their history with the depth necessary to make them the
focus of a microhistorical study.
Moreover, as the documentary progresses, the macrohistorical
approach seems to become increasingly predominant, so that by the end,
the spectator is left with the impression that this is a film about the pub-
lic history of the country, with an emphasis more on the “Israel” than on
the “home movie” of the title. This is not only because there are a lot of
sequences with home movies that are not explicitly associated with a
specific home moviemaker, so that they might be confused with amateur
or professional footage if they did not often reveal their “imperfect”
nature, with excessive camera movements, extremely brief shots, or gazes
to camera by the people filmed. It is also due to the increasing attention
given to political and public events, as noted above, that has the effect of
blurring the microhistorical approach. Already by the halfway point of
the documentary, in the year 1967, an eight-minute sequence (46’–54’) is
dedicated to the Independence Day parade, the Six-Day War, and the
subsequent forced displacement of Palestinians. Later, a fourteen-minute
sequence is dedicated to the Yom Kippur War (71’–85’). And, apart from
the nonhistorical epilogue, the documentary effectively ends with the
presentation of two macrohistorical events: the 1977 electoral victory of
the Likud Party and Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel (89’–90’).
 1 6 0  ID E NTITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

In the epilogue, Lilti and Bernstein highlight the importance of home

movies in a context unrelated to historical research, a rather paradoxical
and even contradictory conclusion, given their use in the film as visual
archive materials to support its historical chronicle. They begin this sec-
tion with the words of TV host Meni Peer, who argues for the truth value
of home movies compared to the massive impact of television, which
“didn’t film the truth, it filmed a staged truth” (91’). Immediately there-
after begins the epilogue proper, articulated around a poem by Raquel
Chalfi about the passage of time, which make a series of comparisons of
two different stages of life in a rhythmic manner. These lines are illus-
trated with home movies of couples, of children and adults, smiling to
the camera or kissing, in black and white and in color, but all imbued
with a marked sense of the passage of time. This foregrounds the value of
the film image as a medium that freezes the moment and embalms time,
in a clear echo of the Bazinian understanding of cinema. It is a conclu-
sion with an undeniable poetic charge that pays a heartfelt tribute to
home movies, but it is a tribute that seems slightly at odds with the histo-
ricized value they have been given throughout the film. It is in this ten-
sion between family document and historical document, between micro-
historical and macrohistorical perspective, between the truth value of
home movies and their amplification through oral testimony, that Israel:
A Home Movie is articulated as a documentary whose very title carries a
tension that its filmmakers handle with uneven success, with a result
that is, in any case, an innovative contribution to Israeli historical docu-
mentary cinema.

T H E D I ARY/AUTOBIOGRA PHICA L P ER SP EC T I V E
O N T HE PAL ESTINIAN- ISRAE LI CON FLI C T

As indicated above, the other documentaries that are studied here all
take an autobiographical perspective: For My Children, My Terrorist, My
Land Zion, and A World Not Ours. These films give more attention to the
present moment than the autobiographical documentaries analyzed in
previous chapters do, because the key questions they explore are contem-
porary. But to answer those questions, the filmmakers need to examine
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL A N D PA LESTI N E1 61

and understand a recent past that is intimately intertwined with the con-
flicts that currently afflict the region. They are questions that are always
posed from personal perspectives, although in direct relation to macro-
historical contexts: the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the identity
of the new State of Israel, or the precarious future of a possible Palestin-
ian state. In this way, as Linda Dittmar points out, invoking a well-
known principle that emerged out of the feminist movement but has had
broader repercussions, these films situate “the personal within the politi-
cal, and the political within the personal quite deliberately.”5
The present is usually explored in these films through diaristic
approaches. This is an approach that can also be found in other Israeli
documentaries with similar themes and structures, but that are not
strictly classifiable as microhistorical documentaries because of the
absence of a significant examination of the historical past. Examples
include David Perlov’s diary films and documentaries like Out of Love . . .
Be Back Shortly, Another Land, and 5 Broken Cameras. Although these
films all contain an interesting combination of macro- and microscales
of observation, they are marked by a focus on the present, on the account
of a witness, rather than on the perspective of a historian conducting an
analysis of a past period. Nevertheless, it is worth offering a brief over-
view of these documentaries here to identify elements in each that come
close to a microhistorical approach.
The film diary format is rather unusual in nonfiction cinema and
bears a number of features that distinguish it from standard autobio-
graphical practices. These particularities are analyzed in more detail in
chapter 7, which is dedicated to the films of Jonas Mekas, but for the
discussion here it is useful to distinguish between two approaches visible
in the films mentioned above: diary films and documentaries with a
“journal entry approach,” a term proposed by Jim Lane.6 Diary films
reflect a style closer to written diaries, as they consist of footage filmed at
regular intervals, which is subsequently edited while maintaining the
character of the images as a visual diary, generally supported by autobio-
graphical voice-over commentary. Documentaries made using a journal
entry approach have a diaristic temporal and formal structure, but their
time frame is more restricted, with a beginning and an end related to the
specific project, which is usually established before filming begins. This
distinguishes them clearly from diary films because, as Philippe Lejeune
 1 6 2  ID E N TITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

explains, diaries have no ending because there is always an expectation

that they will continue; they look to the future, in contrast to autobiogra-
phies, which are written from the perspective of the end with a gaze
toward the past.7
The diary films of David Perlov are a clear example of the first
approach. They consist of two different series: Diary (from 1973 to 1983,
divided into six parts) and Updated Diary (from 1990 to 1999, in three
parts). In these two series, the Brazilian Israeli filmmaker has put
together a film diary of his life, focusing mainly on everyday situations
with his family, friends, his native Brazil, and so on. However, in his
diary entries on life in Israel, Perlov also includes important political
events. For example, in his first chapter he includes the Yom Kippur War
and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel. The end of part 3
and much of part 4 are dedicated to the Lebanon War and to various
protest demonstrations. And much of part 2 of Updated Diaries is taken
up with public history, such as Perlov’s recollections of Yitzhak Rabin’s
assassination and the electoral victories of Bibi Netanyahu in 1996 and of
Ehud Barak in 1999. The distinctive aspect of Perlov’s films is the per-
sonal perspective he offers on macrohistorical events, through both the
footage filmed and his reflections in the autobiographical voice-over. Yet
these sections are firmly anchored in the present of his diary entries,
with more of an emphasis on his role as an eyewitness of public history
(either as a participant or as a television viewer), at the expense of the
more analytical, retrospective view normally associated with the work of
the historian.
In the case of films structured according to a journal entry approach,
similar dynamics can be found in the documentary Out of Love . . . Be
Back Shortly (1997) by Dan Katzir (a former student of Perlov’s at Tel Aviv
University). This documentary offers an autobiographical account of his
life in Tel Aviv from 1994 to 1997, interweaving his everyday experiences
(focusing on his romance with Iris) with political events of the 1990s,
such as the terrorist attacks of those years, the peace treaty with Jordan,
and the assassination of Rabin. Like Perlov’s, Katzir’s perspective is
closely linked to the present of his life, although its interesting combina-
tion of the private/family and public spheres gives it a clearer associa-
tion with a microhistorical approach. The film effectively captures the
 ID E N T IT IE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 63

hopeful perspective of a young filmmaker (this was his first feature film)
who has found love, and who at the same time is optimistic about his
country after the Oslo Accords, an optimism undermined by frustration
when Rabin is assassinated. The assassination is established as the key
event in dialogue with the personal love story (forming the central pillar
of its narrative structure), not only for the impact it had on his generation
but also because it ends up slipping indirectly into his autobiography when
his girlfriend joins the army and meets one of Rabin’s granddaughters
there. The filmmaker actually highlights this public episode as the axis
around which his autobiographical narrative turns: “I think that every-
one remembers the hope that we had then. My film is trapped between
these two poles of sadness and this desire for something. For me it’s love.
I think this film belongs to Yitzhak Rabin because his time in office will
be remembered as a time of hope and my film is filled with this hope.”8
One year later, Amit Goren released the documentary Another Land
(1998), a film similar to Katzir’s in its combination of personal/family ele-
ments and public history. The Israeli filmmaker structures his film as a
diary of his life from 1992 to 1996, with a few brief final entries from 1997
and 1998. With a style reminiscent of Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March,
Goren narrates the ups and downs of his family life: his romantic rela-
tionships (his separation from his wife, Tal, and two subsequent part-
ners) and his relationships with his two children, his siblings, and his
parents (who travel from New York to Tel Aviv every summer). But this
family chronicle is interwoven with key episodes in public history: the
First Intifada, the Oslo Accords, Rabin’s assassination, and so on. The
images of these events sometimes look like the product of his work as a
journalist (although this is never made explicit), adding new dimensions
to this personal chronicle. His autobiographical voice-over also articu-
lates a reflection on the relationship between these different scales, lead-
ing to an interrogation of the meaning of “home,” a concept that is liter-
ally associated with moving house (his own moves, his brother’s, and his
parents’ between the United States and Israel) and, more symbolically,
with his connection to the land and the nation. This last dimension
echoes a specific theme of his previous documentary, ‘66 Was a Good
Year for Tourism (1992), which tells of his family’s immigration from
Egypt to Israel and then to the United States. In this life journey, their
 1 6 4  ID E NTITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

status as Mizrahi Jews plays a very important role, an element also pres-
ent in Another Land, although more in the background.9
Another film with a journal entry approach, but this time from the
Palestinian perspective, is 5 Broken Cameras (2011). Directed by Palestin-
ian Emad Burnat, with co-direction by Israeli activist and filmmaker
Guy Davidi, this film documents events that occurred a decade later
from the 1990s films we’ve been discussing, from 2005 to 2010. Burnat is
a farmer living in Bil’in, a West Bank village, who began using a camera
on the occasion of the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. At that time, the
Israeli government decided to build a barrier to separate his village from
a nearby settlement. Outraged by a measure that cut them off from their
farmland, the villagers begin weekly protest demonstrations that gradu-
ally turn into a symbol of the struggle against Israeli occupation. At this
point, Burnat extends his home moviemaking to filming the protests and
the Israeli repression and its consequences for him, his family, and his
neighbors (ranging from prison to death, as in the case of his friend Phil).
The documentary thus becomes a film diary combining everyday life
(school, birthdays, etc.) with the fight for land and subsistence in this
small village. There is a kind of evolution in the images and the scenes
filmed, from a more naive perspective at the beginning toward a growing
self-awareness of the filmmaker’s duty as a privileged witness to this
struggle, probably underscored thanks to the involvement of the Israeli
filmmaker Davidi in the project. However, the film never completely
loses the intimate, ingenuous tone it has in the beginning, moving the
spectator with its portrait of the lopsided confrontation between the vil-
lagers of Bil’in and the Israeli soldiers. The scale of observation is defi-
nitely micro, but the story as a whole has more the quality of a chronicle
of events as they are happening than a historical account, even though
the film covers a five-year period. In any case, the filmmakers have man-
aged to create a portrait that transcends the trials of this small village to
convey the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the perspective of its weakest
victims, the ones who suffer the consequences of the occupation and
who try to respond without resorting to violence. In this sense, Gibreel,
whom we watch grow and celebrate his first five birthdays, becomes the
best symbol of this village, without hardly uttering a word, simply inhab-
iting the film that his father had never imagined making when he filmed
him as a newborn in his crib.
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 65

M I CHAL AVIAD’ S FOR M Y C H I L D R EN

Notable among autobiographical films with a more significant microhis-

torical approach are the works of two female Israeli filmmakers, Michal
Aviad and Yulie Cohen, whose filmographies present some striking
parallels. The similarities between them begin with their biographies:
Aviad was born in 1955 and Cohen in 1956, both spent time in the United
States at the beginning of their careers, and both returned to Israel when
they started their respective families. Both also made personal docu-
mentaries about Israel that were released in 2002, Aviad’s For My Chil-
dren and Cohen’s My Terrorist, although Cohen would end up making a
trilogy, with the subsequent films My Land Zion (2004) and My Brother
(2007). These parallels have prompted authors like Yael Munk and Linda
Dittmar to study the two filmmakers together. Munk considers them in
the broader context of the emergence of female filmmakers who, since
the early 1990s, have been contributing a feminine gaze to Israeli cinema,
focusing on “the Other in order to create visibility for those ignored by
the hegemony—women, children, the elderly and those defined by the
hegemony as enemies.”10 Dittmar, meanwhile, situates them in the con-
text of the autobiographical production of those years, along with film-
makers mentioned above such as Folman, Mograbi, Goren, and Katzir,
pointing out how these films “position themselves critically in relation to
Israel’s foundational myths.”11 Dittmar argues that they show a dialectic
of repression and recognition that is expressed in contradictory vectors:
“a belief in a Jewish birthright to that country (by heritage, birth and
daily practice), and a recoil from the brutal consequence of that belief,”
making it impossible for them to ignore “the realities of conquest and
ethnic cleansing that underlie the heroic narratives of a land ‘redeemed’
by Jewish sacrifice.”12
This interpretive context is definitely where Michal Aviad’s historical
documentaries belong, especially For My Children, but also to some
extent The Women Pioneers and Dimona Twist. Neither of these last two
films adopts an autobiographical perspective, but they do reflect some of
the tensions described above, while also incorporating something of a
microhistorical approach. The Women Pioneers, released in 2013, tells the
story of five Jewish women from the moment of their immigration to
Palestine in the early 1920s through to 1948. This story is based on their
 1 6 6  ID E N TITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

diaries, which are read in a voice-over, and illustrated by public archival

footage and photographs of these women in the 1920s and 1930s (comple-
mented in the final part of the film by recent pictures of them, now older).
The fact that these are not people of public importance and that their
diaries serve as the main archival source gives the film a certain micro-
historical quality, even though the visuals are made up mostly of footage
that is not strictly biographical, although it is thematically and histori-
cally related as it shows life on the kibbutzim (communal farms) in those
years. In Dimona Twist (2016), Aviad explores the history of the small
town of Dimona, founded in 1955, through the stories of seven Jewish
women who immigrated there in the 1950s and 1960s from North Africa.
The film is structured in chronological chapters (immigration, child-
hood, adolescence, adulthood) and ends with a shorter chapter (“the
time that went by”) as a kind of recapitulation, illustrated with images of
Dimona today. The main source of information is a series of interviews
conducted with the women, visually supported by old family photo-
graphs of theirs and especially by public footage of Dimona in those
years. It is thus an approach to the history of a small town with a micro-
historical tone, told by seven women who arrived there when it was still
an inhospitable place, in stark contrast (as the family photographs of
their homelands show) to the lives they had come from, especially the
ones from cosmopolitan Casablanca, the cultural and economic center
of French Morocco at that time.
However, For My Children (2002) is the film by Aviad that most clearly
reflects a microhistorical approach. From the perspective of the turbu-
lent present of the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September and
October 2000, the filmmaker offers a portrait of contemporary Israeli
history directly connected to her personal and family experience. The
title of the film itself, For My Children, makes this explicit, as the ques-
tion of what country Israelis are leaving to their children effectively con-
stitutes the premise of the whole narrative. This question finds visual
expression in a recurring scene in the documentary, which also serves as
its opening and closing scene: her two children leaving the house to go to
school, their mother filming them from the terrace while they make
their way down the street (see figure 6.3).
Aviad starts her film in the uncertain present of the Second Intifada,
but her aim is to look over the State of Israel’s past in search of clues that
 ID E N T IT IE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 67

FIGURE 6.3 For My Children. Opening sequence, with the filmmaker’s children leav-
ing home for school.

might shed some light on what the future holds for her children. In this
sense, For My Children offers a thought-provoking exploration of a past
in which the micro- and macrohistorical dimensions are intimately
intertwined. This mixing of scales also happens in the present of the
film, as can be seen in the numerous sequences located in the home,
where she and her husband (and sometimes her children) watch the
intensifying conflict on the television news and discuss it. Her investiga-
tion into the past follows a similar pattern, as the country’s history is
explored through her own personal stories and those of her husband, her
parents, and her in-laws. This serves to underscore two of the main fea-
tures of microhistory: the human agency of the historiographical inves-
tigation, and the choice of a reduced scale of observation.
To give shape to this interweaving of scales, For My Children elabo-
rates an intricate palimpsest of materials and time frames, giving it a com-
plexity that reflects different conflicts, eras, and mentalities. Throughout
 1 6 8  ID E NTITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

the film Aviad uses public archival material, generic in nature or related
to specific historical periods, a few times even with her own family mem-
bers taking part in the events shown in the footage (her husband and
her brother-in-law at the protest marches of the 1960s, her father-in-
law at the Vatican, and her father working on a kibbutz). There are also
home movies from her time in California in the 1980s, and later at her
house in Tel Aviv. And she also includes contemporary footage, in the
form of interviews with her parents and in-laws, conversations with her
husband, and everyday family scenes, where the domestic nature of the
images acquires a certain ambiguity given that they were filmed by a
professional filmmaker who perhaps already had them in mind for this
specific project. In addition, as mentioned above, numerous scenes show-
ing television news are included, sometimes accompanied by conversa-
tion, others focusing more on the news itself. All these materials are
combined in a way that blurs temporal frames, with a kind of diaristic
chronological sequencing applied only to the scenes in the present, where
they are shown at home watching the news on the Second Intifada. The rest
of the film fluctuates between the older generation’s memories of the 1930s
and 1940s, both older and younger generations’ memories of the 1960s and
1970s, Aviad’s memories of the 1980s with her husband in California, and
memories of the 1990s that include the third generation (the children/
grandchildren).
It is not Aviad’s intention to offer a conventional historical chronicle
of the Zionist movement or the State of Israel. Indeed, she barely contex-
tualizes the historical events, taking it as a given that the spectator is
already familiar with the macrohistorical context. Only the dates of the
immediate present are signaled on the screen, although it is not even
indicated that we are in the first days of the Second Intifada. Her chron-
icle centers instead on the life journey of her parents, Gabi and Nora (and
more briefly on that of Gabi’s second wife, Mitka); her in-laws, Geoffrey
and Deborah; and her husband’s and her own experiences. What makes
it interesting is that the very different life paths of these seven people
help convey a sense of the complexity of contemporary Israel. Nora
speaks of her Italian background, the rise of Mussolini, and the enact-
ment of anti-Semitic laws in Italy. Gabi, who is of Hungarian origin,
talks about the rise of Nazism, his arrival in Israel in 1947, his work on
the kibbutzim in those years, and his participation in the war of 1948.
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 69

Geoffrey has passed away, but we are told about how he immigrated to
Israel on the insistence of his wife, and how he became increasingly
involved in interreligious dialogue. Deborah has quite an unusual back-
ground, as she is an American of Irish Catholic origin who converted to
Judaism. Shimshon, the filmmaker’s husband, got involved when he was
young in the leftist Matzpen movement and in the protests against the
occupation of the Palestinian territories and discrimination against
Mizrahi Jews. With all these stories, Aviad weaves together a narrative
filled with tensions. On the one hand, the life journeys and memories of
the first generation (Gabi, Nora, Mitka, and Deborah) all uphold the
national project of the State of Israel, with different nuances. Geoffrey’s
life, however, points in another direction, expressed clearly by his son
Shimshon, when he suggests that in his years in Israel, he became pro-
gressively more Jewish and less Israeli. It is Shimshon who has most
openly questioned the official historical narrative ever since his youth.
His wife is not quite so explicit, combining an affectionate attitude
toward the previous generation with a critical perspective that she effec-
tively conveys through the focus she places on her husband in the film.
Overall, the historical overview presented in For My Children follows
more along the lines of the revisionist historians, also referred to as New
Historians, who since the 1980s have questioned the official historical
narrative, opening up an avenue for more critical readings that give the
question of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a central focus.13 While it is
true that the revisionist tone that seems to pervade the film does not go
so far as giving a voice to the Palestinians (a fact that Lisa Polland
remarks on with surprise in her lengthy review of the film),14 this omis-
sion is consistent with a microhistorical perspective, which does not seek
to give a voice to all sides, but to engage in an intensive study of a histori-
cal period through one family—in this case the family of the filmmaker
herself.
As can be seen, the different threads used by Aviad to weave together
this rich microhistorical tapestry are highly diverse: stories of migra-
tions (forced or voluntary), tumultuous personal and historical periods,
and questions about the uncertain future of the country. The filmmaker
moves deftly between these stories and time frames, combining materi-
als and sources to achieve resonances that offer a deeper understanding
of the complex history of contemporary Israel and its conflict with the
 1 70  ID E NTITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

Palestinian world. Her style, in any case, is not opaque, as she works with
the standard elements of a documentary narrative, such as interviews,
archival material, and contemporary footage taken with a journal entry
approach. The interviews sometimes seem to become the main resource,
thereby bringing the film closer to an oral history approach. But Aviad
places these interviews in close connection with the archival materials to
amplify their implicit and explicit meanings. Although this archival
material is sometimes used in a naturalized way to illustrate what the
interviewees are saying, even in such cases a certain amplification of
their meaning can be discerned. This is evident, for example, when Nora
talks about her fascination with Mussolini and the sensation of betrayal
she felt when he promulgated the anti-Semitic laws, while we are shown
public footage of Mussolini’s visit to Trieste, which visually translates
and contextualizes Nora’s initial fascination with the dictator (10’). On
other occasions, the connection is more metaphorical, opening the foot-
age up to interesting associations. An example of this is the sequence
where the family goes to the countryside to celebrate Gabi’s eighty-first
birthday (17’–23’). Aviad establishes a dialogue here between three time
frames: the present of the celebration, another near present moment of
an interview with Gabi at his home, and a black-and-white newsreel
from 1947 about the establishment of the HaOgen kibbutz. Gabi’s off-
screen gaze in the countryside leads into alternating cuts between that
day of celebration and the foundation of the kibbutz in Wadi Qabbani in
1947, as if this archival footage were bringing his memories to life. This
temporal indiscernibility so typical of personal memory is accentuated
by his voice-over narration taken from the interview, which moves
between the nostalgia of his memories of those years on the HaOgen kib-
butz and his resigned acceptance of the failure of a hoped-for peaceful
coexistence between Jews and Palestinians. This resignation is made
even more obvious by his silence in response to his son-in-law’s question
about what remains of those values: an eloquent silence that somehow
pervades the rest of the film as well.
The home movies that appear in For My Children also add different
values and new layers of meaning to the microhistorical tapestry. The
oldest, from the 1930s, belong to the Wigoder family and show Geoffrey’s
bar mitzvah in 1935, and other scenes from 1939. The temporal distance
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL A N D PA LESTI N E1 7 1

underscores the nature of this footage as a historical record, a repository

for the family memory reused in a naturalized way, without altering its
original meaning. The next home movies we see were filmed by Aviad
and her husband in California in the 1980s and conform to the usual
celebratory mode of such footage: the birth of their first son, a festive
parade in the street, their parents’ visit, and so on. But now they acquire
a new dimension, since their insertion here in contrast to the uncertain
present serves to underscore the anxiety and fear and to underline the
question of whether it was the right decision to return to Israel. Aviad
also includes everyday scenes at the house in Tel Aviv, with her mother,
Nora, or with the children, occasionally related to Italian cuisine, which
serve to connect history to everyday life. The final layer of this domestic
palimpsest is composed of the scenes filmed at home after the outbreak
of the Second Intifada—where the married couple’s fears and uncertain-
ties become much more explicit—and the ones showing Aviad’s children
going to school, with an eloquent silence in which those uncertainties
reverberate. Aviad’s use of these home movies is versatile, as can be seen
in one of the most effective sequences in this sense (40’–43’), which once
again highlights the temporal indiscernibility resulting from personal
recollection. A contemporary domestic scene between father and son,
Shimshon and Itamar, playing at home, cuts to another similar scene ten
years earlier, where father and son are play-acting a military march, with
the boy carrying a toy machine gun (see figure 6.4). The playful tone of
the old home movies contrasts openly with the subsequent conversation
in the present, when Aviad expresses her anxiety at the thought that in
four years Itamar will have to do his military service, while the television
set continues to show the news of the current conflict.
The film displays these approaches and themes further in other scenes
not commented on here, since they do not add relevant variations to the
sequences already analyzed. These clearly show how For My Children
offers a different approach to the history of Israel and its conflict with
Palestine. Aviad has created a powerful film positioned between the per-
sonal and the historical, with a complex combination of time frames
and filmic strategies, to offer a highly interesting microhistorical per-
spective based on the rich tapestry of testimonies and archival materials
it contains.
 1 72  ID E NTITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

FIGURE 6.4 For My Children. The filmmaker’s husband and son play-acting as march-
ing soldiers in a home movie.

YUL IE COHEN ’ S MY TERRORIST

AND M Y LAND ZIO N

The filmmaker Yulie Cohen has made a trilogy on Israel, its national
identity, and its relationship with the Palestinian people, with obvious
parallels with Aviad’s work, but also with noticeable differences.15 While
both filmmakers take an autobiographical perspective, Cohen’s films
give the present more weight than it has in For My Children, as the con-
text from which she engages in a decisive examination of the past. This
gives her films a significant microhistorical perspective, with different
degrees of intensity throughout her trilogy: more explicit in My Terrorist
(2002), more essayistic in My Land Zion (2004), and more tenuous in
My Brother (2007). This last film focuses on the filmmaker’s quest to
recover her relationship with her brother, who separated from his family
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 73

twenty-five years earlier when he became an Orthodox Jew. Cohen uses

this premise to examine the contrast between contemporary secular and
Orthodox Israel, with her exploration of the past centered mainly on
family relationships. Given its less historiographical orientation and its
main focus on contemporary issues, this film is not included in the close
analysis that follows. The other two films, My Terrorist and My Land
Zion, have more in common, as they both adopt a revisionist approach to
the hegemonic narrative of the State of Israel, in a manner even more
explicit than For My Children. The first film does this mainly through
the narration of a personal story, while the second engages in a closer
examination of the foundational myths of Zionism.
My Terrorist tells the story of a terrorist attack in which Yulie Cohen
was a victim in 1978 in London, and her reconciliation, twenty-three
years later, with the Palestinian responsible for it, Fahad Mihyi. The film
traces Cohen’s evolution away from her stance as an Israeli nationalist,
who grew up in a neighborhood of army officers and later served as an
officer in the military, toward a questioning of this vision and of the
causes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Lebanon War and the Sabra
and Shatila massacre deepened this personal crisis and prompted her to
leave the army. Years later, while working as a coordinator on a film
shoot in the occupied territories, she came to realize that both Israelis
and Palestinians played a role in perpetuating the conflict. This led her to
seek out the person responsible for the 1978 attack, who was still in a
British prison. Discovering that he had completely changed his attitude,
she met with him in the prison, forgave him, and eventually even
endorsed his parole application. Cohen does not ignore the extraordi-
nary nature of her decision in the tumultuous context of those years; on
the contrary, she highlights it through the inclusion of a subplot about
her relationship with a woman whose daughter was killed in another ter-
rorist attack. The documentary includes two long sequences, one show-
ing both women interviewed on television (2’–7’), and the other showing
a subsequent meeting between the two in a hotel (33’–39’), which present
their antithetical and seemingly irreconcilable positions, despite their
mutual efforts to understand one another.
The documentary has a structure that swings between contemporary
scenes with the filmmaker and scenes recounting the past. In the pres-
ent, we see scenes in Cohen’s house of her talking to her two daughters
 1 74  ID E NTITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

and worrying about their safety and scenes of the meetings with the
woman who lost her daughter, her correspondence with Mihyi and her
trip to London to visit him (which does not include the meeting itself, as
she was not allowed to film inside the prison), her crisis after the Twin
Tower attacks in 2001, a meeting with an Israeli friend sympathetic to
the Palestinian cause, and so on. Into this contemporary narrative Cohen
inserts elements of her own background as a sixth-generation Israeli,
and an overview of her personal experience of Israel’s contemporary his-
tory: from the Six-Day War in 1967, when she was eleven, to the Yom
Kippur War, the peace with Egypt, the war with Lebanon, the Oslo
Accords, all the way up to the Second Intifada, a conflict ongoing at the
time she made the documentary.
Cohen’s position is one of actively searching for an alternative to the
ongoing conflict, and it is this that leads to her decision to forgive Mihyi,
as a public example to show that such an alternative is possible. Underly-
ing this is her theory, controversial for many Israelis, that Fahad is also a
victim and that Israel actively contributes to the perpetuation of the con-
flict with its expansionist and repressive policies. She openly expresses
this view when the Second Intifada breaks out, criticizing both Ariel
Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount (as the catalyst that served to provoke
it) and the Israeli government’s response to the uprising. Cohen sees this
response as a war of expansion to create a “greater Israel,” without the
moral justification of the previous wars (1948, 1967 and 1973), which were
always defined as defensive wars in the official narrative. “This is not my
war,” she asserts in a voice-over, “this is not for my country, this is not a
war of survival. This is the fight for greater Israel. And in this war, hun-
dreds more Israelis, Jews, Muslims, Christians, will die, especially civil-
ians, many of whom are children, and some soldiers” (26’).
My Terrorist is thus a documentary that cleverly combines an intense
examination of the present with a personal retrospection on recent
decades. It is therefore not strictly a historical documentary, but its
exploration of the recent past certainly offers a chronicle imbued with a
microhistorical perspective, visible in its reduced scale of observation
and in the central role of human agency that typifies autobiographical
stories with a historiographical intention. However, the film does not
rely on an investigation into the past as detailed as that found in For
My Children, making its historiographical scope more limited. This is
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 75

recognizable, for example, in the reduced use of archival materials,

which also generally fulfill a primarily illustrative function; these include
both public archival footage covering major historical events and footage
from her family archive, basically family snapshots, as well as newspaper
cuttings related to the 1978 terrorist attack. It is also evident in the film-
ing, which sometimes seems to be closer to a reality television style, due
to the professional standard of filming of many confessional scenes in
which Cohen shares her thoughts and frustrations. The title credits and
some extratextual research reveal that the person filming her is usually
her husband, Moshe Gertel, which would explain the intimacy evident
in the more confessional scenes, although this detail is never made
explicit in the film and therefore would not affect the ordinary specta-
tor’s reception of these scenes.
The questions raised in My Terrorist are taken up again two years later
in My Land Zion (2004), combining a microhistorical perspective on
Cohen’s family history with an analysis of the foundational myths of the
State of Israel. This time, Cohen explores the past and present contradic-
tions of her country more openly, tackling the challenge of finding a bal-
ance between her Israeli identity and her critical view of the prevailing
nationalist narrative. Her analysis results in a thought-provoking inter-
action between present and past, and between macro- and microhistory,
with a clearer effort to draw conclusions that could shed light on the
complexity of the questions raised. She pursues this goal with a style
similar to My Terrorist, with professional standards of filming that in
this case do not strike a discordant note, as there are hardly any domestic
scenes or confessional moments. Instead, there is an abundance of inter-
views, usually conducted in a fairly informal, conversational manner, as
most of the people interviewed are relatives or friends.
Much of the film’s first twenty minutes is dedicated to reviewing key
points of the nationalist creed, which Cohen sums up concisely in her
voice-over: “The State of Israel was the God and Zionism was the way,
our secular religion” (6’). Two main sequences connect past and present,
family story and national history, in a combination of scales of observa-
tion that gives this film its microhistorical perspective. In the first
sequence (3’–6’), the filmmaker goes to Palmach Museum with her par-
ents, and later on, she accompanies them to a Memorial Day commemo-
ration at this museum, while she explains in voice-over that her parents
 1 76  ID E NTITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

had been members of the Palmach (an elite fighting force of the Haga-
nah, the underground army of the Jewish community during the British
Mandate for Palestine). In the second sequence (13’–20’), together with
her friend, the historian Motti Golani, Cohen climbs up to the site of
Masada, a fortification built in the first century BCE whose defenders
committed mass suicide rather than give themselves up when the
Romans laid siege to the site in 74 CE. Masada is a lieu du memoire with
considerable symbolic power for the new State of Israel, and this is
reflected in the archival footage and in the explanation offered by the
filmmaker, who used to make the climb to this site every year with her
parents.
At the same time, Cohen reveals the darker side of this nationalist
narrative. On her visit to Masada, she makes it clear to Golani that she
has never taken her daughters there because she no longer believes in
the idea that places nation above life, one of the foundational myths of
the State of Israel of which Masada is an unambiguous expression.
Indeed, this is one of the leitmotifs of her film, which begins and ends
with her questioning whether it was a good idea to return to Israel when
she started her family, whether it is the right place for her daughters to
grow up, in an obvious echo of Michal Aviad’s premise in For My Chil-
dren. Cohen also points out that the dark side of Israeli Independence
Day is Nakba Day, the Day of the Catastrophe for Palestinian Arabs, the
date that marks their displacement from the occupied territory by the
Israelis in the war of 1948. An interview with Cohen’s parents (8’–12’)
delves into this question, deconstructing the official narrative describing
the departure of the Arabs as voluntary; this version is refuted by her
father, who remembers the military campaign and acknowledges that
they had the express objective of expelling the Palestinians from their
villages. Her mother seems uncomfortable with the question, as now she
works as a volunteer for an NGO that helps Palestinians at checkpoints,
but she argues that those times of war cannot be judged by today’s stan-
dards. She also refuses to answer the question about whether or not her
granddaughter should do her military service, a refusal highly symbolic
in someone of the generation that helped to build the State of Israel.
The connection between past and present, between micro- and mac-
rohistorical narrative, is also made clear in another of the recurring ele-
ments of the film: the houses. This is evident in the contrast between the
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 77

house belonging to Shula, Golani’s mother, and a nearby house in ruins,

which belonged to a Palestinian family expelled in 1948, who come back
to visit it every year. Golani has never told his daughter who owned that
house that they had seen so many times on their way to her grandmoth-
er’s place (see figure 6.5). Shula, meanwhile, admits that she has always
preferred to ignore it, as when they arrived their priority was security,
although now that she is an old woman she understands that things
could have been done differently. The filmmaker discovers that in this
place there was once an Arab town called Daniyal, with 2,728 inhabit-
ants, which has now disappeared; she finds this information in a book
that is not available for sale in Israel, on the disappearance of Arab vil-
lages in 1948. This is one more example of the parallel stories that form
the foundations of Israel’s and Palestine’s opposing visions, which reveal,
in the words of the analyst Yossi K. Halevi, how both are caught in a
“cycle of denial” that perpetuates the conflict.16
My Land Zion reflects this cycle of denial in various ways, so that in a
certain sense it ends up becoming its main theme. Since Cohen bases the
film on her autobiographical experience, she focuses on the problem
posed on the Jewish side, delving further into the central question of My

FIGURE 6.5 My Land Zion. Yulie Cohen, her friend Motti Golani, and his daughter
looking at a house, now in ruins, which belonged to a Palestinian family expelled in
1948, near Golani’s mother’s home.
 1 78  ID E N TITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

Terrorist. This question is perhaps dealt with most clearly in the sequence
beginning with the news of the murder of a Jewish settler who had been
a casual acquaintance of Cohen’s (19’–24’). On hearing the news, the
filmmaker goes to visit the settler’s family, leading to a sequence that
allows the murdered man’s widow to frankly express her point of view
that there is enough space for Jews and Palestinians to live together in
peace. But then Cohen revises this thesis, and while we are shown archi-
val footage of the construction of a kibbutz and contemporary footage of
new settlements, she states in a voice-over that the past decades have
shown her that there are no limits to the Zionist dream, concluding with
the statistic that “since 1967, 380,000 Jewish settlers have moved into the
occupied territories.” These tensions sometimes lead Cohen to verbalize
her inner conflict, to the point of asserting that “we Israeli Jews must
stop being an oppressive colonial state,” convinced, as she had already
acknowledged in My Terrorist, that Israel is also guilty of perpetuating
the conflict. Golani makes a similar assertion when he suggests that the
problem is in the present, in continuing to deny that “our right to exist is
based upon the destruction of another people,” as exemplified by the
destruction of Palestinian neighborhoods to build the separation wall in
Jerusalem in those years.
My Land Zion also addresses another of the central pillars of the State
of Israel’s foundational narrative: its relationship with the Shoah, a ques-
tion that is also present in For My Children, but which in My Land Zion
becomes a much more explicit theme, again through the combination of
micro- and macrohistorical scales. The personal connection is estab-
lished through Shula, Golani’s mother, a Hungarian-born Holocaust
survivor. The film does not attempt to analyze such a complex issue,17 but
the different conversations on the subject make it clear that the Shoah
continues to serve as a justification for the defense of the State of Israel,
including its repression of Palestinians. This is evident when Cohen her-
self seems to nuance her view of Israel as an “oppressive colonial state”
by following this statement with her recalling a comment made by
Golani’s father that, after being released from the concentration camps
and arriving in Israel, they “didn’t care about the Arabs” (54’). Shula
expresses a similar idea on one occasion when she remarks: “I believe
that without the State of Israel our chances of surviving are much slim-
mer” (44’). The trip that Motti Golani and Yulie Cohen make with their
 ID E N T IT IE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 79

respective daughters to Shula’s childhood home in Hungary (34’-40’)

aims to explore this connection between the Shoah and the present,
although the filmmaker seems to struggle here with the difficult balance
between the need to investigate this link and a fear of delving into the
complexity of the issue.
In the final part of the film, the filmmaker, supported by Golani’s tes-
timony, looks to a future with a single democratic state for both Jews and
Arabs. To reinforce her idea, Cohen goes back to the past, once again
through the microhistorical perspective of her family story (50’–54’).
Accompanied by her father, Cohen visits the home of her great-
grandfather, born in 1870 in Jaffa. Here, she reconstructs that era when
Jews and Arabs lived together in peace, supported by archival material
and the testimony of her father, who remembers how his family hoped
for the establishment of an Israeli state, but never at the expense of the
Arab population. The film ends with a long reflection by Cohen, finish-
ing her documentary on an ambiguous note, with a defense of her Israeli
identity associated with the land where she was born: “When I decided
to come back to Israel to give birth to Stav, I believed that belonging was
one of men’s basic necessities, and that here I was giving her a profound
sense of belonging. . . . I look and love the Israeli landscape, the senses,
the sea, the land, the roots and the light. My love for this is what keeps
me here” (57’). In this way, she exposes the root of the conflict, the asser-
tion of the “native” status of the Jews (which in the Zionist ideology gives
them the right to expel the Palestinian Arabs), but now without the
counterweight of the arguments critical of Zionism unpacked through-
out the film. It is for this reason that Yosefa Loshitzky criticizes Cohen’s
position, precisely because this ending seems to contradict her “newly
gained understanding of the Palestinian conflict,” shifting to a stance
that Loshitzky describes as “soft Zionism, a political stance typical of the
positioning of the Israeli left.”18 In the end, the film reflects its autobio-
graphical character as a personal journey toward an understanding of
“my land Zion,” revealing tensions and contradictions closely related to
the filmmaker’s life journey. In this sense, it could be argued that the
solution proffered by Cohen, with its assumption that Jewish nativism is
compatible with Palestinian aspirations, is excessively naive or utopian.
Nevertheless, it is clear that her perspective is articulated upon an open-
ness to the plight of the Palestinians, facilitating a critical revision of the
 1 8 0  ID E N TITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

foundational myths of Zionism, an approach that sheds light on the

issue, but that also leaves some paradoxical questions unresolved.

D O C UM ENTING PAL ESTINIAN REFUGEE C A MP S:

M AHDI FL EIFEL’ S A WOR L D N OT O U R S

Finding microhistorical narratives in Palestinian documentary cinema

is somewhat more difficult. One of the reasons for this is the smaller
number of films made, due largely to the difficulties associated with film
production within the Palestinian territories, as well as these films’ lim-
ited distribution and visibility.19 Some of the documentaries made by
Mohammed Bakri—better known in Palestinian cinema for his work as
an actor—might come close to a microhistorical approach. One of these,
1948 (1999), looks back to the Nakba fifty years earlier, remembering it
through a collage of interviews with a wide variety of people: singers,
poets, actors, residents, historians, and so on, including Bakri himself.
Ten years later he released Zahra (2009), which tells the story of his aunt
from 1948 through to the present day. Through her story, Bakri is able to
reconstruct the history of a portion of the Palestinian population that
fled during the war of 1948 but then returned shortly afterward to Galilee
(in the case of his aunt’s family, only to see their land confiscated to build
the new Jewish town of Karmiel). However, Bakri focuses mainly on the
family story, which he recounts through interviews with his aunt and her
ten children, and the film falls short of pursuing a significantly historio-
graphical goal. Moreover, it only occasionally mentions the macrohis-
torical context, with the support of material from public archives to
illustrate the references to the wars of 1948 and 1967. Overall, the docu-
mentary stands out more as what Michael Renov classifies as “domestic
ethnography” than as a microhistorical documentary.20
However, notable in the film production of the Palestinian diaspora is
one documentary that portrays the lives of Palestinian refugees with an
interesting microhistorical approach: A World Not Ours, released in
2012, which met with considerable success at international festivals.21 Its
director, Mahdi Fleifel, offers an autobiographical story about the Ain
el-Helweh refugee camp (established in southern Lebanon in 1948, and
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL A N D PA LESTI N E1 81

with a population of 70,000 in 2011), which becomes somewhat represen-

tative of one of the most severe effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
the refugee camps, whose collective population has grown from around
700,000 after the war of 1948 to more than 5 million as of 2021.22 Fleifel’s
parents were born and grew up in Ain el-Helweh, and, after getting mar-
ried, they moved to Dubai. They returned to the camp when Fleifel was
seven years old, but three years later they immigrated permanently to
Denmark, although they continued to spend many summers at the refu-
gee camp. Years later, after studying film in London, Fleifel dedicated his
first feature-length documentary to a portrait of life at Ain el-Helweh,
based mainly on his stays there in 2009 and 2010. The importance given
to this recent present would at first seem to distance this film from what
a historical documentary is understood to be. But A World Not Ours goes
further than chronicling life in a Palestinian refugee camp today, creat-
ing a narrative that explores the past through the (auto)biographical tri-
als and tribulations of the filmmaker and his relatives living there. It is
thus a historical narrative that exhibits some of the main features of
microhistory, that is, the reduction in the scale of observation, the cen-
tral role given to human agency, and the limited number of archival
materials that Fleifel explores intensively.
The filmmaker offers a succinct macrohistorical context to frame his
family story, although he takes as given that the spectator is already
familiar with the basic points of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Near the
beginning of the film (10’), he includes the only scene with an explicitly
contextualizing objective: over footage from public archives, he offers a
one-minute summary of the origins of the refugee camps, followed by a
presentation of basic information on Ain el-Helweh. Later, he presents
another important event in public history: the handshake between Ara-
fat and Rabin at the Oslo Peace Accords (44’), but this time linked to a
memory of his father, who recorded it and would play it over and over, as
if unable to believe what he was seeing. A more original element is the
periodic references to the World Cup soccer tournaments, where the two
historiographical scales converge in a unique combination of everyday
life and popular culture. The different editions of the tournament over
the years mark both the evolution of life in the refugee camp and the
filmmaker’s biographical relationship with his origins: the 1994 World
Cup, which Fleifel recalls as the best summer of his life, when the camp
 1 8 2  ID E NTITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

came to a standstill to watch the competition, and Brazilian, Italian, and

German flags filled the streets for the whole month of the competition;
the 2006 edition, when he met his friend Abu Eyad (see figure 6.6); and
the most recent one, in 2010, overshadowed by Aby Eyad’s weariness and
desperation, and without even the incentive of having any of their
teams in the final, which was won by Spain, as indicated fleetingly by a
shot of a Spanish flag flapping on a rooftop at the camp at the end of the
sequence (81’).
What Fleifel is most interested in, as can be seen in the scenes related
to the World Cup, is portraying the everyday life of people living in a
refugee camp. The filmmaker thus does not attempt to explain the politi-
cal and social conflicts at Ain el-Helweh, the fights between the different
Palestinian factions, the complex relationships with the Lebanese
authorities, or the confrontations with the Israeli army. Instead, he seeks
out the human dramas of the people living there, through a portrait of
three different generations: his grandfather, his uncle Said, and his friend
Abu Eyad. With these three personal stories as guiding threads, he
weaves past and present together, giving the film greater depth as we get
to know their stories and the impact that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
has had on their lives. In keeping with the premise of focusing on life at

FIGURE 6.6 A World Not Ours. Watching the 2006 World Cup in the Ain el-Helweh
camp.
 ID E N T IT IE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 83

the camp, he does not include his parents in the present, nor does he
himself appear on-screen. His presence is nevertheless felt clearly, not
only through his voice-over narration, but also through his interaction
from behind the camera with the people filmed.
From a temporal point of view, the film presents an initial frame of
reference linked to the filmmaker himself. From a present located geo-
graphically in Europe, Fleifel traces the main family milestones: his par-
ents’ wedding, Dubai, Ain el-Helweh again, and, finally, Denmark, all
illustrated with snapshots and home videos filmed mainly by his father.
The perspective of exile pervades this autobiographical thread as it does
throughout the rest of the film, as the filmmaker acknowledges clearly in
the sequence narrating their move to Denmark. In this sense, A World
Not Ours could be characterized as “accented cinema,” to use a category
proposed by Hamid Naficy in his 2001 book, as it offers an autobiograph-
ical narrative from the perspective of exile. Paradoxically, however, the
film lacks an “accent,” both in the voice-over, narrated by the filmmaker
in perfectly standard English, and in the music used, which consists
mostly of American tunes with a jazz flavor, in a deliberate decision by
Fleifel “to move away from what I felt had become a cliché in Palestinian
docs—the use of oud music, which is very melancholic and sets a depress-
ing mood.”23 In a way, this apparent paradox was already acknowledged
by Naficy when he explained, in relation mainly to fiction films, that “the
accent emanates not so much from the accented speech of the diegetic
characters as from the displacement of the filmmakers and their arti-
sanal production modes.”24
Through this exilic voice, Fleifel also offers a kind of portrait of a
transnational family, along the lines of other documentaries that rely on
family archives to tell transnational stories marked by exile, such as Exile
Family Movie (Arash T. Riahi, 2013) or I for India (Sandhya Suri, 2005).25
Fleifel addresses the transnational dimension of his family more implic-
itly, as a frame of reference, as the members living in Europe (his nuclear
family) only appear in the past, although the centrality of his own auto-
biographical position makes up for the absence of the rest of his immedi-
ate family in the present of the narrative. The tensions inherent in the
transnational nature of his family are reflected in the contrast between
his privileged situation as a European resident and the precarious condi-
tions of life in Ain el-Helweh. This contrast results in an uncomfortable
 1 8 4  ID E NTITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

ambiguity, as Fleifel acknowledges, through the confrontation of his

emotional connection and genuine personal commitment to this place
and its people with the security that his current Danish citizenship gives
him. This inner tension is reflected in his own understanding of the refu-
gee camp as his home, which evolves from the his more idealized adoles-
cent conception of the camp toward a progressive recognition of the
harsh reality of the refugee camp and the personal conflict that this rep-
resents for his self-image as an outsider/insider. This struggle is also vis-
ible in an eloquent sequence showing his trip to Israel in 1997 with a
group of Jewish schoolmates from his high school in Denmark (69’–71’).
Fleifel records the trip with his handheld camera and provides a voice-
over of his impressions on his first visit to his homeland—the villages of
his grandparents—where he could also meet his cousins, in contrast
with the sensation of being an outsider during the rest of the trip. This
contrast is especially acute when he visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust
Museum, another moment strongly symbolic of the clash of historio-
graphical scales, as Fleifel cannot connect with this place because it
brings to his mind the Israeli army’s repression of the Palestinian people
(illustrated briefly with archival images), in an inverse reflection of the
argument presented in My Land Zion about the influence of the Holo-
caust on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
While the autobiographical perspective serves as a framework, the
main focus of A World Not Ours is on the residents of Ain el-Helweh.
Fleifel provides a collective portrait covering around ten years, from his
first visit alone in the year 2000 (when he was twenty), to 2010, which is
depicted as the present in the documentary, with other footage of his
from 2006 and 2009, and a few other home movies of the family from
earlier years. The older the images are, the more obvious their nature as
home videos recorded for family viewing is. This domestic quality begins
to give way to a more professional style in the footage filmed in 2009 and
2010—by which time Fleifel had graduated from a film school and had a
documentary project in mind—without losing its intimate, familial tone,
similar to that of other autobiographical documentaries made with a
journal entry approach. Overall, A World Not Ours offers a portrait
remarkable for its effort to capture the passage of time in the people and
places filmed, resembling the style of longitudinal documentaries with
their periodic returns to examine the signs of the passage of time in their
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 85

protagonists.26 While it is true that the time period that Fleifel covers is
not very long (ten years), the home videos filmed by his family at the
camp date back to 1985, providing a more marked impression of the pas-
sage of time during those intense decades in the evolution of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
This temporal arc expands even further if we include the biography of
the oldest protagonist, the filmmaker’s grandfather (see figure 6.7).
Although no images of him are shown dating back earlier than the year
2000, it is stated that he has been at Ain el-Helweh since it was estab-
lished, sixty-four years earlier, in 1948. He refuses to leave, because this
for him would mean giving up his right of return, despite the fact that his
wife, now deceased, often insisted that they should move to Europe with
their children. But the character who reflects the history of Ain el-
Helweh most poignantly is Fleifel’s uncle Said. Using home movies from
the 1990s and even images from a comic book made about them, the
filmmaker tells the story of how Said and (especially) his brother, Jamal,
became semi-legendary characters at the refugee camp. At the age of just
thirteen, Jamal defended the camp against an Israeli invasion, and both
brothers then helped to rebuild it. Years later, however, Jamal was injured
by the Lebanese army and died at the age of twenty-three. Since then,

FIGURE 6.7 A World Not Ours. The filmmaker’s grandfather in front of his house in
the Ain el-Helweh camp.
 1 8 6  ID E NTITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS R A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

Said has become an irrelevant and almost laughable character who lives
alone, earning a living recycling soft drink cans, and putting all his
energy into looking after his pigeons. The film offers an affectionate por-
trait of this character, a genuine loser in a seemingly doomed world.
Curiously, his caring for pigeons, which appear on several occasions
soaring through the sky, serves as a metaphor for the longing for free-
dom of a people trapped in a nation that is not their own, crowded
together on a square kilometer of land, waiting for a return that never
comes. The contemporary character in this drama is Abu Eyad, who is
featured in much of the most recent footage. A member of Fatah, the
largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), he works
in a security role at the camp. His growing frustration and disillusion-
ment with life at the camp seem somehow to reflect the general weari-
ness of the population with the stagnation of history for the Palestinian
refugees. Abu Eyad decides to migrate illegally to Europe, but he is
detained and eventually returned to Lebanon. A World Not Ours ends
there, with a visit by the filmmaker to his friend in Greece, followed by a
final caption informing us of his deportation. This final sad note con-
trasts with the tone of everyday resistance reflected in many scenes of the
film. It is a resistance in a way different from that observed in other films
analyzed in this book, as although it reflects the ideas of Michel de Cer-
teau about the micro-resistances inscribed in everyday life, it also
includes another, more collective kind of resistance, embodied in the
whole population of Ain el-Helweh and their defense of a return to a
land that seems to be slipping further and further out of reach.
Yet, just before this bleaker ending, there is another, more inclusive
one (88’–89’), in which Fleifel condenses the different temporal layers
and archival materials used, united by the music and the voice-over nar-
ration, to offer an autobiographical recapitulation that brings the macro-
and microhistorical dimensions into dialogue with each other. While
the filmmaker is leaving Ain el-Helweh for the last time (at least in the
film’s narrative), the images from old home movies from the 1980s and
1990s—with his grandparents and the people from the refugee camp—
are mixed together with old footage of Palestine and Israel that he dis-
covers on his return to London, including a scene with David Ben-
Gurion, the former Israeli prime minister, then retired from politics,
working on his farm. Fleifel remarks that when he found this footage, he
 ID E N T IT IES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL AN D PA LESTI N E1 87

began to wonder what things would have been like if his grandfather had
stayed in his native land, how he might have spent his summers with him
in Palestine instead of at the refugee camp. Once again, the autobio-
graphical dimension shapes the complex portrait constructed in A World
Not Ours, as the filmmaker makes explicit when he suggests that perhaps
“the reason I’ve been so obsessed with filming Ain el-Helweh was more
than just to keep a record of my family history; it was a faint hope that I
can protect the sense of belonging to somewhere” (89’). The need to have
roots, to belong, to recognize a place as one’s home thus becomes the
dominant trope of the whole documentary: that home the refugees lost
when they were forced out of Palestine and which they continue to hope
to return to (the grandfather), the home they try to maintain in Ain el-
Helweh despite the fragility of their situation (Uncle Said), the home the
filmmaker himself looks for by coming to a better understanding of his
exilic condition. A World Not Ours could be understood this way as a
kind of answer to the question posed in My Land Zion about the history
and fate of the owners of the vacant Palestinian house next to the home
of Motti Golani’s mother.
From Israel: A Home Movie, to For My Children, My Terrorist, and My
Land Zion, and to A World Not Ours, diverse microhistorical approaches
have explored the recent history of Palestine and Israel and the ongoing
conflict that has shaped their difficult co-existence. Like the chronicling
of the incarceration of Japanese Americans analyzed in chapter 4, this
variety of approaches to the same historical reality reflects a depth and
complexity characteristic of documentary film to explain the compli-
cated past and present of these territories. While it is true that most of
these films take a critical view of the official Zionist discourse, it is also
certain that the nuances they offer can contribute to a better understand-
ing of the different sides of the conflict. This is thanks to the distinctive
microhistorical approach offered by the film medium, imbued with a
powerful emotional charge, often supported by the use of archival mate-
rials not only as historical sources but also as mnemonic catalysts—
something absent from traditional historiographical approaches.
 7
THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN JONAS
MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

T
he films of Jonas Mekas undoubtedly constitute the best-known
filmography based on a diaristic approach. Chapter 6, on Israeli
and Palestinian documentaries, offers an initial overview of films
with a diaristic structure. In that chapter, I distinguish between “diary
films” in the strict sense, exemplified by the work of David Perlov, and
other films that exhibit a “journal entry approach,” restricted to the time
period of a specific film project. This chapter again explores diary
films—in this case, Jonas Mekas’s—with a focus on an aspect that has
not been widely studied and that may at first seem somewhat unortho-
dox: their microhistorical dimension. To this end, after offering a very
basic outline of Mekas’s biography, I turn to a discussion of his diary film
practice. This is followed by a brief consideration of Reminiscences of a
Journey to Lithuania, and, finally, a close analysis of the film that pres-
ents the most interesting microhistorical dimension of all his work, Lost,
Lost, Lost. This analysis examines the narrative of Mekas’s experience as
an American immigrant, supported by the chronotopic approach pro-
posed by Mikhail Bakhtin for literary analysis, which offers a uniquely
valuable framework for studying immigrant autobiographies.1
Jonas Mekas’s life was marked by one of the many migration waves of
the twentieth century: specifically, the immigration of Lithuanians to
the United States after World War II. Lithuania was invaded by the Soviet
Union in 1940, occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941, and then occupied
again by the Soviets in 1944. These invasions resulted in the exile of
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST 189

members of the communities persecuted by these regimes, as well as

mass deportations both to Germany and to the USSR. When World War
II ended, many forcibly displaced Lithuanians chose to immigrate to
other countries in Europe or the Americas, since their homeland
remained under Soviet control. This was the case for Jonas Mekas, who
had fled Lithuania in 1944 and decided to immigrate with his brother
Adolfas to New York in 1949. By that time there was already a large Lith-
uanian population in the United States, concentrated mainly on the East
Coast, having arrived in various waves since the nineteenth century.2
Jonas Mekas began diary keeping as early as 1944, when he started a
written diary (which appears in Lost, Lost, Lost in parts of Reel 1 and
portions of which he reads in the voice-over).3 Five years later, just after
arriving in New York, the Mekas brothers bought a Bolex 16 mm camera
(with borrowed money), which Jonas started using to film his everyday
life and events in the Lithuanian community in New York. Then, in the
late 1960s, he decided to make films for public exhibition using the foot-
age he had been taking for years. After Walden (1969), Mekas released
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976).
In the first part of Reminiscences, but especially in Lost, Lost, Lost, Mekas
reflects on his experience as an immigrant, connecting it to the experi-
ence of the Lithuanian community in the United States, offering a perspec-
tive that could effectively be described as microhistorical. However, Lost,
Lost, Lost evolves from a style closer to historical chronicle in the first part
of the film toward an autobiographical reflection later in the film, when
Mekas becomes more concerned with the process of integration in the
new country, which in his case was channeled through the artistic and
film world of New York City. Beginning in the 1950s and especially dur-
ing the 1960s, Mekas gradually became one of the main promoters of
independent and avant-garde film in New York, backing initiatives like
the magazine Film Culture, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and the Film-
Makers’ Cinematheque (which eventually grew into the well-known
Anthology Film Archives). These initiatives and the filmmakers associ-
ated with them also appear in the second part of Lost, Lost, Lost, so that
in a looser sense it also contains a kind of microhistorical chronicle of
that artistic milieu.
Including Lost, Lost, Lost in a study of microhistorical documentaries
may seem somewhat controversial. For one thing, it might be argued that
the recognition achieved by Mekas means that his diary films no longer
 190JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

fit into the category of “history from below” normally advocated by

microhistorians, where the focus is on individuals who are not figures in
public history. However, as with Rithy Pahn and The Missing Picture, the
film analyzed here covers a period of time (from 1949 to 1964) when
Mekas was largely unknown, especially in his first years as a Lithuanian
immigrant. It could also be suggested that a film that evolves toward an
autobiographical perspective that is so authorial does not really fit the
apparently more restrictive definition of historical documentary. Indeed,
as is analyzed below, it is obvious that Mekas’s work does not fit into the
typical definitions of either historical or microhistorical documentary.
But my intention in this last chapter is to explore new ways of understand-
ing history, in line with the theories of Robert Rosenstone discussed in
previous chapters, through the analysis of a borderline, historiographi-
cally unorthodox case.
It is also worth questioning whether film diaries constitute an appro-
priate source for the construction of a microhistorical chronicle. The
more traditional format of written diaries has increasingly become a his-
toriographical source, often used by historians with no personal connec-
tion to the materials, as Penny Summerfield discusses in her book Histo-
ries of the Self.4 Some studies based on these sources have a clearly
microhistorical orientation, as is the case, for example, with Vahé Tachji-
an’s Daily Life in the Abyss: Genocide Diaries, 1915–1918, which draws on
the diaries of two survivors of the Armenian genocide to offer a micro-
historical chronicle of that episode in history.5 The same can be said for
Katherine Pickering Antonova’s An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a
Gentry Family in Provincial Russia, which constructs a portrait of pro-
vincial life in nineteenth-century Russia based on the diaries and other
household documents of the Chikhachev family.6 However, it is quite
unusual to find filmmakers who make use of other people’s film diaries,
and even films made using a filmmaker’s own film diaries are far from
common. Such cases could be compared to diaries of writers or artists, as
often such diaries are kept with the relatively explicit intention of being
made public at some point in the future. In any case, like written diaries,
diary films do not always contain a significant historical or historio-
graphical dimension, although those that do often take a microhistorical
view of the past. By their very nature, diary films involve a reduction in
the scale of observation and give centrality to human agency. But in this
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST1 91

case the filmmakers are working with materials that have been gathered
over the course of several years and are related to their personal experi-
ence, which distinguishes their work with these film diaries from the
conjectural approaches—adopted due to a lack of historical sources—of
much microhistorical research. This does not necessarily reduce the
value of the interesting microhistorical perspectives they can offer, sup-
ported by a double temporality that facilitates a more specifically auto-
biographical retrospection, which is not an inherent feature of written
diaries. This retrospective dimension, introduced in the editing stage, is
what gives these films a more characteristically historiographical approach
of a microhistorical nature, as a distinctive way of constructing a history
of the present. This inherent complexity of the diary film, as it is mani-
fested in Mekas’s work, is worthy of further consideration before moving
on to an analysis of his films.

MEKAS’S DIARISTIC PRACTICE: FROM FILM

DIARIES TO DIA RY F I LMS

Mekas’s diary films seem to resist definitive labels. As diaries, they could
be considered autobiographical films, although his work may fit better
into the approach proposed by Paul John Eakin, who places autobiogra-
phy within the broader practice of self-narration, with “narrative iden-
tity” as the key concept unifying the two practices. Eakin stresses that
“narrative is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological
and cognitive self-experience.” This is why he goes on to argue that “to
speak of narrative identity is to conceptualize narrative as not merely
about identity but rather in some profound way a constituent part of
identity, specifically of the extended self that is expressed in self-
narrations.”7 From this point of view, the diary films of Jonas Mekas, and
particularly Lost, Lost, Lost, can be understood as a case of self-narration,
an exploration of personal identity in narrative terms.
Mekas’s films pose another problem in terms of labeling since they are
usually considered to fall somewhere between experimental and docu-
mentary cinema. The unequivocally indexical character of the images is
counterbalanced by the strong subjectivity of his films, placing them in a
 192JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

middle ground between these two film modes, once considered antago-
nistic but now increasingly viewed as related.8 This is due to the evolu-
tion in recent decades of documentary practice, which has amplified its
conventional focus to include more personal approaches. Mekas’s work is
a good example of this type of personal approach, since almost all of his
films are based on the diaries he filmed and edited over more than fifty
years, documenting his daily activities. As such, Mekas’s work offers a
remarkable perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the diary
format in cinema.
Diary films and written diaries are both similar and different in vari-
ous ways. Both possess the two basic features identified by Jean Rousset
for this genre: secrecy (in the sense of privacy) and regularity.9 However,
audiovisual diaries have specific features that distinguish them from
written diaries; notable among these is their double temporality, as
David E. James indicates when he proposes two categories to better
describe this diary process.10 The first category, “film diary,” refers to the
daily footage filmed over the years. This stage has a close connection to
the standard written diary, although with no temporal distance between
the event and its diary entry. When filmmakers decide to make a “film”
out of these film diaries, they create a “diary film,” transforming private
records into public discourse and expanding their original meaning. At
this point, as James points out, the film diary’s reach is “extended into a
mode of greater discursivity, one capable of social extension and of deal-
ing with the past.”11
This double temporality points toward other peculiarities that become
evident when studying the process of making diary films. One of these is
the eternal “present” time of the filmed image, which has an immediacy
not achievable in written texts. The camera captures the instant of people
performing their daily routines. At the same time, both the characters
and the filmmaker openly acknowledge the process of filmmaking as
part of their lives, introducing a complex interplay between the factual-
ity of the recordings and their performative dimension. The film diarist
explicitly acknowledges the process of construction, engaging in prac-
tices inspired by the home movie approach, which is especially evident in
Mekas’s films. But here the supposed defects of home movies become a
mark of style, a rejection of the standardized practices of industrial cin-
ema. Mekas’s work—and that of other diarists—thus acquires added
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST 1 93

meanings, since it is presented as an act of vindication of a new kind of

filmmaking, taken out of the private domain to be turned into a public
statement.12 The subjective dimension of this work is also reflected in the
highly self-conscious molding of the film, making it function, as Susana
Egan suggests, “as an extension of the body, as a source of experience
rather than design.”13 For Mekas, the main challenge when filming a
diary becomes “how to react with the camera right now, as it’s happen-
ing; how to react to it in such a way that the footage would reflect what I
feel that very moment.”14 To achieve this, Mekas needs to transcend stan-
dard styles, appropriating modes of the avant-garde: “I had to liberate
the camera from the tripod, and to embrace all the subjective film-
making techniques and procedures,” in order “to merge myself with the
reality I was filming, to put myself into it indirectly, by means of pacing,
lighting, exposures and movement.”15
The second stage in the construction of the diaries—the editing—
actually takes place in two phases. The first happens in the present time
of filming, when the filmmaker is editing during the shooting—
“structuring the work,” as Mekas describes it, as it is being filmed.16 The
second is the standard editing phase, when the different scenes are put
together. In Mekas’s diary films the cuts made in this stage are related
mainly to reducing the span of time covered, while keeping the chrono-
logical and fragmented structure also characteristic of a written diary
and respecting the in-camera editing so crucial to his films. In fact, he
refers to this “second” stage of editing as simply “elimination, cutting out
the parts that didn’t work, the badly ‘written’ parts.”17
In this final phase of editing, Mekas adds several layers of sound and
texts, which enhance the subjectivity and creativity of the work. He
introduces descriptive, symbolic, or poetic titles to punctuate the general
structure of the film and adds asynchronous sounds—from street noise
to music to human voices—for effect. His voice-over commentary is the
most important later addition, explicitly foregrounding the double tem-
porality of these diaries, transforming the present of shooting into the
past of remembering. As Maureen Turim explains, “the cinematographic
rendering of moments considered present at the instants of their record-
ing become memoirs when recollected through montage, a montage that
includes a voice situating the emotions of the time. The voice carries the
weight of pastness. It turns the phenomenology of experience into that of
 19 4JO NAS M E KAS ’S LOST, LOST, LOST

reminiscence.”18 This voice-over brings in a highly reflexive dimension to

the film, moving it away from an explicit diary format toward a more
standard autobiographical work, since it introduces the retrospective
perspective of the narrative that is absent in diaries. As Philippe Lejeune
explains, “the autobiography is above all a retrospective and global nar-
rative, tending toward synthesis, while the diary is a quasi-contemporary
and fragmented form of writing.”19 The final outcome offers a singular
balance between diary and autobiography: the visuals are strongly sug-
gestive of the diary format, with the daily footage resembling the entries
typical of a diary; but the final editing and the voice-over structure these
visual entries into a particular narrative, giving closure to the images, or,
as Turim suggests, converting them into memoirs.
Both James and Turim point out the historical perspective inserted
into Mekas’s diaries in the final editing stage, when they acquire “a mode
of greater discursivity” capable of “dealing with the past,” thanks to the
intertitles added and to the voice-over that conveys “the weight of past-
ness,” turning “the phenomenology of experience into that of reminis-
cence.” Although it is true that this dimension is not present to the same
degree in all of Mekas’s films, it is especially noticeable in Reminiscences
and Lost, Lost, Lost. In these two films, he offers a particular portrait of
his immigration and exile experience, linked to the experiences of the
Lithuanian community in the United States, by giving his film diaries of
the 1940s and 1950s a historical perspective. In this way, Mekas’s films offer
a microhistorical view of this major phenomenon of migration in the
twentieth century, constituting a paradigmatic example of what Hamid
Naficy refers to as “exilic filmmaking.”20 Taking this framework into
account, the next section briefly examines Reminiscences, before moving
to a more detailed analysis of Lost, Lost, Lost in the section after that.

RE MI NI SCENCES O F A J O UR NE Y TO L I T H UAN I A

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania stands on its own as a reflection

on the past, since it is composed of images of Mekas’s first years in the
United States and of his first trip back to Lithuania in 1971, after twenty-
five years in exile. As Turim observes, “the artist creates a portrait of
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST 195

himself as a displaced person whose mother and past form the center to
which he journeys as part of a quest for what is true of experience.”21 The
film is divided into three parts. The first, in black and white, is dedicated
to Mekas’s first years in New York. The second, titled “100 GLIMPSES
OF LITHUANIA,”22 is the longest, documenting the trip taken by Mekas
and his brother Adolfas to Semeniškiai, their hometown in Lithuania, in
brief numbered scenes, with footage in color, and his characteristic
impressionist style of filming, which he began using in the 1960s. The
third, which is the shortest, shows two short stops made after the Lithu-
ania trip: first to visit Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg where they spent
almost a year in a forced labor camp during the war; and then Vienna, to
meet their friends Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson,
and Ken Jacobs.
The chronicle of his trip to Lithuania is the main part of the film, not
only by virtue of its duration but also because of its importance to
Mekas’s autobiographical narrative. These “glimpses of Lithuania” carry
a powerful emotional charge, due to the reunion with the Mekas broth-
ers’ mother, family, and friends, and their return to the places where they
grew up. Mekas offers a chronicle focused closely on the present of the trip,
the emotions associated with the reunion, the materiality of the places
(and even of the tastes: the fresh water from the family well or fresh cow’s
milk), conveyed not only by the images filmed—by Mekas or by his brother
Adolfas and his wife—and his voice-over commentary, but also by the
numerous sound recordings of conversations or songs, all inserted asyn-
chronously. This present is intimately tied to the past, to the memory of
the happy times of their childhood and youth, but with an autobiographi-
cal perspective focusing on a personal and family context, with hardly
any microhistorical resonances or any macrohistorical contextualiza-
tion. Only on two occasions does Mekas refer to the historical context in
this section. The first time, he recalls the reason why he fled Lithuania—he
was editing an underground anti-Nazi newspaper when the country was
invaded by the German army—although he explains this in a section
specifically titled “parentheses.” The other reference—which is brief and
indirect—appears when he visits the old school he attended as a child,
and in his voice-over he wonders: “Where are you now my old childhood
friends? How many of you are alive? Where are you scattered through
the graveyards, through the torture rooms, through the prisons, through
 196JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

the labor camps of Western civilization?” (50’–51’). Later on, he makes his
intention not to focus on social or historical issues explicit when he con-
siders a hypothetical question about why he doesn’t deal with the situa-
tion in Lithuania under the Soviet regime, explaining in the voice-over that
he does not feel he has the authority to discuss it because of his exilic
condition: “I am a displaced person on my way home, in search of my
home, retracing bits of the past, looking for some recognizable traces of
my past. The time in Semeniškiai remains suspended for me” (30’–31’).
This status of “displaced person” is contextualized in the shorter first
section (twelve minutes), which functions as a necessary prologue for
understanding the scenes in the “present” of the trip taken in 1971. This
first section can also be understood as a summary of the questions that
Mekas addresses more extensively in the first two reels of his next film,
Lost, Lost, Lost. In this first part of Reminiscences, he sums up ten years
of his life, as he says at the beginning, marked by his immigration to
Germany and then to the United States. Mekas does not follow a specifi-
cally chronological order, as he begins his film with images of a trip to
the woods, while his voice-over talks of how on a trip he took around
1957 or 1958, for the first time, he forgot his homeland and didn’t feel
alone in America: “I was slowly becoming a part of it. There was a
moment when I forgot my home. This was the beginning of my new
home” (2’). He then presents a flashback to 1950, offering a ten-minute
chronicle of his life as a displaced person, as a member of the Lithuanian
community in Brooklyn. The sense of rootlessness dominates these
scenes, not so much because of the images but because of his voice-over
commentaries. While it is true that occasionally he shows solitary Lithu-
anians in the streets, or newly arrived immigrants with hopeless expres-
sions, as if weary of life, most of the scenes are in a style typical of home
movies: gatherings, celebrations, happy faces (see figure 7.1). Neverthe-
less, his commentary reveals his suffering in those years, filled with
memories of his homeland, and a feeling of rootlessness that he shared
with the rest of the Lithuanian community. He drives this point home in
his commentary on one of the festive gatherings, introduced by the inter-
title “A GATHERING OF DP’S IN STONY BROOK” (1950), underscored
by the elegiac tone of his voice: “Somewhere at the end of Atlantic Ave-
nue, somewhere there they used to have their picnics. I used to watch
them, the old immigrants and the new ones, and they looked to me like
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST1 97

FIGURE 7.1 Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. A Lithuanian community picnic

in Brooklyn.

some sad dying animals in a place they didn’t exactly belong to, in a place
they didn’t recognize. They were there on Atlantic Avenue, but they
were completely somewhere else” (5’–6’). The use of third person to refer
to the Lithuanian community is an early signal of Mekas’s progressive
distancing from his roots, which found full expression in the early 1950s
in his move from Brooklyn (where most Lithuanian refugees lived) to
Manhattan. However, his feeling of exile never seems to leave him alto-
gether, judging by another reflection that he includes shortly afterward:
“We still are displaced persons, even today. . . . The minute we left, we
started going home, and we are still going home. I am still on my journey
home” (8’).
This first section of Reminiscences thus presents a brief narrative with
a microhistorical tone of the Lithuanian community’s immigration
experience after the end of World War II. This would also be the main
theme of the first two reels of Lost, Lost, Lost. The parallels between the
 19 8JO NAS M EKAS ’S LOST, LOST, LOST

first parts of these two films are very clear, as is shown below; so much so
that in at least two specific moments Mekas even uses the same footage.

LOST, LOST, LOST :

MEKAS’S IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE

Lost, Lost, Lost is the film where Mekas explores his immigrant experi-
ence and his particular process of Americanization more thoroughly. He
uses the footage he shot from the time just after his arrival in the United
States in 1949 through to 1964, which he edited in the mid-1970s and
released as a film in 1976. The film constitutes a unique blend of micro-
historical chronicle and film autobiography, because the filmmaker is a
first-generation immigrant sharing his own immigration experience
through a diary format. Its singularity lies in the fact that autobiographi-
cal films related to the immigrant experience are usually made by film-
makers with immigrant backgrounds who feel a desire to dig into their
family’s past in order to gain a better understanding of their own identi-
ties. But these filmmakers are second- or third-generation immigrants
trying to connect the life narratives of their parents or grandparents to
their own life experience. In such cases, as Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong sug-
gests, a different paradigm emerges, since they are not dealing with the
opposition between Old and New World, but with a set of three systems:
the “ideal” Old World values of their relatives, their “real” Old World
values as actually mediated by those relatives, and the “real” New World
values of the writers/filmmakers themselves.23 This paradigm is absent
from the films of Mekas, a first-generation immigrant with no relation-
ship to other generations and with the sole company of his brother Adol-
fas, who immigrated with him.
A second feature that gives Mekas’s autobiographical approach a qual-
ity of its own, this time in contrast to written autobiographies with a
similar theme, is the absence of the homeland. As mentioned above,
Lost, Lost, Lost begins in 1949, with Lithuania as its primary absent pro-
tagonist. James highlights this same idea with reference to Mekas’s pre-
vious film, Walden, when he describes the film diaries as “negative home
movies, movies that begin from the fact of the absence of home.”24
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST 1 99

Mekas’s reflection therefore centers on the process of American accul-

turation, a feature common to most autobiographical films made by
immigrants, who are usually assumed to have faced a precarious eco-
nomic situation in their countries of origin that would place home mov-
iemaking out of their reach, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, before the
popularization of the Super 8 format. This material constraint results in
a specific approach to immigrant autobiography films that bypasses or
quickly skims the first two stages pointed out by William Boelhower as
characteristic of immigrant autobiography—the dream anticipation and
the journey25—to focus instead on the process of integration into the
new country.
Lost, Lost, Lost’s microhistorical chronicle is analyzed here with the
help of a chronotopic approach drawing on Bakhtinian theory. Mikhail
Bakhtin proposed his chronotopic analysis for literature, and it has been
adapted to cinema by authors such as Michael V. Montgomery, Vivian
Sobchack, and Hamid Naficy.26 Bakhtin’s chronotopes are singular com-
binations of time and space in each work of art where narrative events
become specific: “It is precisely the chronotope that provides the ground
essential for the showing-forth, the representability of events. And this is
so thanks precisely to the special increase in density and concreteness of
time markers—the time of human life, of historical time—that occurs
within well-delineated spatial areas.”27 The chronotopic approach can be
applied to various kinds of narratives, but it seems especially valuable for
the analysis of immigrant autobiography films because the film medium
is so tied to the experience of time and space, both so crucial to the con-
figuration of the immigrant’s identity in the adopted country.28 This is
even more visible when focusing specifically on the spatial experience,
contrasting the places left behind with their new locations. Boelhower
illustrates this when he explains that “habitare . . . is an essential prop-
erty of existence and as such is also the foundational dynamic behind the
montage conventions of autobiography.”29 Boelhower is actually talking
about the crisis of habitare visible in the work of modernist autobiogra-
phers, who turn their focus from the temporal structure typical of auto-
biographies to a spatial understanding, a quest for dwelling where the
modern city is anathematized and the historic city mythologized. How-
ever, his idea can also be applied to the autobiographies of immigrants,
since their experiences can be explained as a quest for dwelling, a
 200JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

struggle to fit into the modern city of an alien country, in sharp contrast
with the idealized places left behind.
The centrality of space is expressed in Mekas’s Lost, Lost, Lost through
the interplay between the diary format and the immigrant experience.
On the one hand, Mekas’s experience of his new country is clearly
marked by the places where he lives, first in the neighborhood of Wil-
liamsburg, Brooklyn, and later on in Manhattan. On the other hand, the
structure of his film shifts the focus away from the temporal dimension,
since the chain of events represented is not tied to a closed causal struc-
ture but rather is based on his daily filming of the ordinary events going
on around him. The film’s temporality thus comes quite close to the
“cyclical everyday time” described by Bakhtin, where “there are no
events, only ‘doings’ that constantly repeat themselves,”30 which is pre-
cisely what happens in standard home movies.
The prominence of the spatial experience does not mean that the tem-
poral dimension is irrelevant in Mekas’s films. The double temporality of
his work—the gap between the filming and the final editing—produces a
discourse that links the spatial experience to the temporal axis, mainly
through the voice-over commentaries. At the same time, this interplay
between voice-over and images helps to foreground the different roles
that Mekas takes on during Lost, Lost, Lost, as narrator and protagonist.
His position as narrator is made dominant through the use of the voice-
over, although it is evident too in his authorship of the titles. At the same
time, he is the protagonist of the events, a presence felt through his elab-
orate and self-conscious shooting and editing, calling attention to him-
self as the filmmaker watching, recording, and reacting to events. This
presence goes further, to the point of becoming literally visible when he
is filmed by other people, like his brother Adolfas, but also Ken Jacobs, in
the final part of the film. These two roles of narrator and protagonist
acquire new meanings when Mekas brings them into dialogue and into
relation with the places and times that define the main chronotopes.
Through this interplay, Mekas appears variously as a wanderer, a watcher,
or a guardian of the new cinema, depending on the place and time where
he locates himself.
Having thus defined the specific nature of Lost, Lost, Lost as an immi-
grant autobiography and contextualized the Bakhtinian approach, I now
offer a close analysis based on the film’s structure in reels. The film is
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST201

divided into six 30-minute reels, signaled explicitly by intertitles.31 The

first two reels cover the years 1949–1952 and focus on Mekas’s exilic sta-
tus and his relationship with the Lithuanian community in New York.
The third and fourth reels trace his process of integration into American
society outside the Lithuanian community, through his relationship
with New York’s independent and alternative film circles. The fifth and
sixth reels conclude this integration process and show Mekas now firmly
established in his adopted country. Although Lost, Lost, Lost evolves
from a microhistorical chronicle toward a more autobiographical narra-
tive, taken as a whole the film can be understood as the narrative of an
individual experience representative of a process experienced by mil-
lions of people who immigrate to a new country, in this case anchored in
the Lithuanian community in the United States, from which Mekas
evolves toward a position connected to New York’s cultural and film
world.

THE MICROHISTORICAL NARRATIVE OF MEKAS’S

I M M I GRA N T EXPERIENCE: R EELS 1 A N D 2

As noted above, the first part of Lost, Lost, Lost, comprising its first two
reels, offers a narrative of the immigration experience from the autobio-
graphical perspective of a first-generation immigrant. This first section
presents a clearer microhistorical perspective, observable in the reduced
scale of observation and the centrality of human agency, at the service of
an account of a personal experience intended to represent a wider his-
torical community, that is, Lithuanians who immigrated to the United
States after World War II. However, as also discussed above, this is not a
typical microhistorical film, but a variation that combines visuals draw-
ing from the filmmaker’s film diaries and a soundtrack with a charac-
teristic retrospective voice-over. Although the film diaries have a style
very similar to home moviemaking, their focus is not on a particular
family but on the Lithuanian immigrant community, understood here
as a kind of extended family, although reflected not only in their celebra-
tory routines but also in their political activities in support of their
homeland. Through his voice-over narration, Mekas highlights his role
 202JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

as a chronicler of this community, as on several occasions he explicitly

identifies himself as such, presenting himself as “the recording eye . . .
the camera historian of the exile” (31’). In a way, the images included in
this first part of the film are reminiscent of the collective chronicle com-
posed by Robert Nakamura and Karen Ishizuka with the home movies
of Japanese Americans in Something Strong Within (analyzed in chap-
ter 4), despite the obvious differences in terms of origin, filming, and
final structure, as both films offer a collective portrait of an ethnic com-
munity in a situation of rootlessness, based on images that reflect their
collective routines from a microhistorical perspective.
In this particular microhistorical chronicle, three parallel stories can
be identified: the community life of Lithuanian exiles, appearing mostly
in the first reel; the more specifically political side of these exiles, which
takes up much of the second reel; and the personal experience of Mekas
himself, conveyed mainly through the voice-over narration. The first two
narrative threads are not always clearly divided, as some of the gather-
ings shown include moments of celebration (greetings, meals, entertain-
ment) and more formal meetings with an apparently political purpose.
But, in general, Mekas exhibits a clear intention to focus first on the
everyday experience of exile in his life and the lives of other Lithuanian
immigrants, and then, second, on the political dimension.
The portrait of Lithuanian community life has many aspects in com-
mon with the tradition of home moviemaking. This is primarily because
in his first years of filming Mekas uses a very transparent, less personal
style, very similar to that usually found in home movies. Moreover,
many of the scenes filmed also fit perfectly into the typical repertoire of
home movies: a day relaxing in a park, a dinner at home with friends, a
picnic, conversations on the way out of church after the Sunday service,
dancing, playing soccer, a celebration in a restaurant, a wedding, and so
on. On several occasions Mekas also uses footage in color, giving the
scene a chromatic range that underscores its celebratory or ludic dimen-
sion, like the gathering in Prospect Park on a spring day or another
similar gathering in Connecticut. Mekas provides minimal contextual
information, beyond occasionally informing us in the intertitles of the
location or the names of the people shown. In this sense, these scenes
also function like home movies, as spectators outside the community
lack the context to enjoy the familiarity that every home movie provides
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST203

when it is screened for the family in question. This limitation extends

here to the use of Lithuanian popular music, used by Mekas quite fre-
quently for the soundtrack, which would not form part of the collective
imaginary of most viewers.
Alongside this thread showing the life of the Lithuanian community,
Mekas’s voice-over narration introduces a melancholic tone that con-
trasts openly with the images of leisure and celebration. This brings into
play the second way of appropriating home movies explained in chap-
ter 2, when the most obvious interpretation of the original home movies
is contested, adding supplementary meanings, in this case underscoring
the rootlessness of immigrant life. In fact, the film begins with an explicit
lament by Mekas, asking Ulysses to sing the story of “a man who never
wanted to leave his home, who was happy and lived among the people he
knew and spoke their language. Sing, how then he was thrown out into
the world.” Ulysses can be understood as a kind of alter ego for Mekas, as
a symbol of the displaced person coming from a country rich in tradition
and culture. This metaphorical identification is actually reinforced in his
written work: first, in his written diary from these years, I Had Nowhere
to Go, which ends with a letter to an imaginary Penelope; and, later on,
in the English edition of his collection of poems, which were written
originally in Lithuanian from 1947 to 1951, which is titled There Is No
Ithaca.32 Mekas reminds us of his exilic status at least one other time in
the voice-over in Reel 1, when he seems to address his artistic commu-
nity in the 1970s, associated more with the avant-garde world: “I know
I’m sentimental. You would like these images to be more abstract. It’s ok,
call me sentimental. You sit in your own homes but I speak with an
accent and you don’t even know where I come from. These are some
images and some sounds recorded by someone in exile” (14’).
This experience of displacement resulting from his exilic status is
expressed in these first reels in the chronotope of the street, which func-
tions, paraphrasing Bakhtin’s formulation, as the essential space for the
representability of Mekas’s struggle during his first years in America.
The street’s role here is similar to that of the chronotope of the road
described by Bakhtin in his work, since it shares some of the same quali-
ties as a place of random encounters, of collision and interweaving for
different groups and social classes.33 But the street of these first reels
lacks direction, becoming more a place where people can stop awhile or
 204JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

pass through, but where no one establishes a home. It is a place with no

owner, where no roots can grow, where one is surrounded by crowds but
can in fact be alone. The street also serves here as representative of other
open urban spaces with a similar meaning in these first reels: the park,
the square, and so on. This use of public open spaces can be explained
partially by the routines of home moviemaking, associated with the fact
of filming special occasions, usually related to “going out.” But in Lost,
Lost, Lost the street acquires a deeper meaning, as the place where Mekas
feels more attuned to his feelings as a displaced person. He roams the
streets of New York as a wanderer, aimlessly, feeling the loneliness of his
displacement as an immigrant deep inside.
This idea is very clear from Reel 1, where Mekas is briefly seen walking
alone in the streets, while a title reads: “THRU THE STREETS OF
BROOKLYN I WALKED,” followed by “I WALKED MY HEART CRY-
ING FROM LONELINESS” (6’). Just after these titles, over images of dif-
ferent public spaces in New York, his voice-over underlines the same
idea: “Those were long, lonely evenings, long, lonely nights. There was a
lot of walking, walking, through the nights of Manhattan. I don’t think I
have ever been as lonely.” This figure of the wanderer is also echoed in
the image of people sitting in the streets with no apparent purpose, the
old Lithuanians that he shows in Reel 1, “WITH NO MEMORIES,” as he
comments in the title (4’). Mekas resorts to the streets as a way to avoid
the loneliness, as he explains when he comments on the images of Ginkus
in front of his candy store: “We couldn’t sit home. It was too lonely. The
streets were empty. We stopped at Ginkus’s candy store” (13’). Mekas is
creating a representation of loneliness, mixing literal and symbolic fig-
ures through the images and soundtrack. In the voice-over, he mixes the
denotative descriptions of some of the images with the poetic strains of
other sentences. The image also becomes symbolic when he is shown on
screen, since the loneliness is no longer literal, because someone—
probably his brother Adolfas—was filming him (see figure 7.2). Mekas’s
feeling of displacement, of having been “thrown out” of his country, is
intensified by the contrast between the Lithuania recreated by the immi-
grants and his growing perception of the impossibility of recovering his
country and his home, as he expresses in his voice-over: “I look at you
now from a distance, crowds, early Sunday afternoon. I look at you. Then
you thought it was all so temporary. . . . We thought it will be all so
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST205

FIGURE 7.2 Lost, Lost, Lost. Jonas Mekas walking alone in the streets of New York.

temporary, we will be all home, soon. And then we all went to different
directions” (25’).
This displacement is also explored by Mekas in more explicit political
terms in Reel 2. In the first minutes of this reel, the figure of Ulysses
reappears, as Mekas twice calls upon him in the voice-over, but this time
to protect Lithuania: “Sing Ulysses, sing the desperation of the exile, sing
the desperation of the small countries” (34’). Nevertheless, Reel 2 intro-
duces a slight change of mood in Mekas’s narration of his experience, as
he becomes a chronicler of the political and social life of the Lithuanian
community in New York. The street as chronotope acquires a more
overtly political quality, with Mekas as the reporter on the Lithuanian
refugees. As he says in the voice-over, he is there as “the chronicler, the
diarist,” or “the camera eye . . . the witness.” In this sense, in Reel 2
Mekas steers between the microhistory of the Lithuanian community
and its public history, with its exiled leaders engaged in the struggle to
recover Lithuania’s independence. Mekas makes no effort to provide a
 206JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

detailed macrohistorical context, assuming that the basic issue—the

Soviet annexation of Lithuania—is widely known. In his portrait of this
more public history, he shows street protests against the USSR on a cou-
ple of occasions (see figure 7.3). He also films meetings of politicians and
activists, although he does not identify them, or only does so in a generic
way, such as when he introduces one of these meetings as the “Commit-
tee for Independent Lithuania.” On a few other occasions he does single
out individuals, usually in the intertitles: Professor Kazys Pakštas, who
lives in Philadelphia; the Futurist poet and orator Juozas Tysliava; Stepas
Kairys, one of the signatories of the Lithuanian Act of Independence in
1918; and Povilas Žadeikis, the ambassador of independent Lithuania in
Washington. Mekas films these scenes as a member of this community,
which gives them a certain hybrid quality, as they reflect a historical
reality but are viewed from an intimate perspective, maintaining the
familial air that pervades his microhistorical chronicle in these first two
reels. Nevertheless, when he returns to these images nearly twenty years
later, Mekas feels himself to be a “historian” of those times, as he recalls

FIGURE 7.3 Lost, Lost, Lost. Anti-Soviet protest by Lithuanian immigrants in New York.
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST207

in his voice-over: “I was there with my camera. I recorded it. This was the
seventh year, for some of you the eighth year in exile. There they were.
The only thing that mattered to you was the independence of your coun-
try. All those meetings, all those talks, what to do, what will happen, how
long, what can we do. Yes, I was there, and I recorded it for others, for
history, for those who do not know the pain of the exile” (47’–48’).
Exile thus continues to be the dominant theme of these two reels,
experienced in both personal and community terms, resulting in a histo-
riographically effective tension between different scales of observation
that is highly characteristic of microhistory. Mekas inserts his own exile
experience into a specific historical community whose hopes and dreams
he shared for four years, and to which he dedicated much of his film dia-
ries in those years. In this way, the filmmaker constructs a particular
history of the present related to the Lithuanian exile community in the
United States, conveyed through two complementary mnemonic chan-
nels: the footage contemporaneous with the events, and his personal
memory looking back retrospectively on those years. As noted in chap-
ter 1 of this book, the film thus contributes a historical dimension to the
time of the personal experience by bringing the personal journey into
dialogue with a basic macrohistorical context. It is a history of the pres-
ent that acquires a more literal sense here, as the diary record adheres
closely to the temporal flow of the events, in a quasi-literal replication of
Henry Rousso’s explanation of the way historians of the present “act ‘as
if’ they could seize hold of time as it passes . . . slow down the process of
time’s retreat and the oblivion that lies in wait for any human experi-
ence.”34 It is in the postproduction stage, with the editing and especially
the addition of the retrospective voice-over narration, that this present
acquires “a substantiality, a perspective, a time frame, as all historians
engaged in periodization do.”35

MEKAS’S PROCESS OF INTEGRATION

IN A MERICA : REEL S 3 A N D 4

At the end of Reel 2, Mekas recounts his decision to break ties with the
Lithuanian community. The celebration of New Year’s Eve in 1952, which
 208JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

ends the reel, is the last event he shares with them, as he explains in a
voice-over. Mekas recognizes that their shared dream of returning to
their homeland is unreal, and he decides to start his life over again in the
new country: “I began to feel that if anything can be done for Lithuania,
it can be done only by the people who lived there. The only way I can be
useful to Lithuania is by building myself from scratch, from the beginning,
and then giving myself back to it” (53’). Because of this perception, Mekas
resolves to leave his life in Brooklyn behind and move to Manhattan,
together with his brother Adolfas. Once again, the spatial understanding
of the self is foregrounded. Mekas understands that there is no point in
trying to live off past memories. Since that life was embodied by the neigh-
borhood of Williamsburg, to begin from scratch meant moving away,
into a new exile, however painful that decision might be (“I felt I was
falling to one thousand pieces,” he says). The new home was not very far
away, but the distance was more symbolic than physical, because it meant
acknowledging the impossibility of recovering his homeland.
The change to his new place is clearly marked in the film by the change
of reel. Reel 3 begins with Jonas and Adolfas living in Manhattan, with
new friends and activities. This reel, which covers the period from 1953 to
1960, therefore portrays a second stage in the process of Mekas’s integra-
tion into his adopted country. This reel is also dominated by the domes-
tic tone of the images, with his brother Adolfas as the other frequent
protagonist (who also often takes the camera to film Jonas). The domestic
is highlighted by the attention given to their homes, even indicating the
changes of address in the intertitles (109th St., Avenue B, 13th St.).
Moments of leisure are also included, such as strolls through Central
Park, various outings, or a snowfall in the city. New friends also appear,
in several cases named in the intertitles: Susan, Gideon, Dorothy, Storm
and Louis, Fennis, Tina, Arlene and Edouard, Frances. All of this gives
these years a tone of normality; the rootlessness of exile does not disap-
pear completely but shifts progressively into the background.
This process of integration has some characteristic features, as once
they move to Manhattan, Mekas and his brother very quickly become
involved in the world of independent and avant-garde cinema. Reel 3
includes the launch of the magazine Film Culture (in 1954), some
scenes from an unfinished film, the film shoot for a movie by Robert
Frank, and a gathering of poets at the Living Theater. Mekas’s process of
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST209

Americanization is thus quite atypical, since his point of view always

remains rather critical of the mainstream values of American life. His
diaries therefore move away from the standard pattern of autobiogra-
phies written by immigrants, which tend to legitimize, as Betty Bergland
explains, the “dominant cultural images of the transformed American
while containing the Other in pre-adult, childlike states.”36 Mekas tran-
scends that pattern because he adopts New York as his home, but in its
more cosmopolitan and cultural sense, becoming part of the alternative
cultural life where the dominant values of Americanization do not
exclude the Other, but rather welcome diversity. In this context, Mekas’s
camera work can be understood as a metaphor for the role played by
culture in the construction of his new life, since the mediation of the
camera leads him to a more conscious and detached gaze, creating a dis-
tance that helps him to open up his point of view, to search for new
roots through a culture that is both “American”—cinematic, visual,
industrialized—and cosmopolitan.
Mekas’s involvement in New York’s cultural life has its filmic correla-
tive in his growing consciousness as a diarist and filmmaker. In the first
two reels, his visual style is restrained and unobtrusive. From Reel 3 on,
the marks of his presence are more explicit, through his visual style and
his commentaries in the voice-over. In these reels we begin to see the
first signs of the kind of loose camera work and rapid in-camera editing
so frequent in his subsequent diaries. Mekas also reflects on his role as a
diarist, remarking that “it’s my nature to record everything” (85’). This is
an idea that comes up again in Reel 4, where he points to the reason why
he tries to record everything: “I have lost too much, so now I have these
bits that I have passed through” (109’). This statement links his filmmak-
ing to the home movie approach, because what he saves from oblivion
are only “bits” that he has “passed through.” The sense of loss acquires a
deeper meaning because it is related to his experience as a displaced per-
son, as someone who has left his home, his family, and much of his life
far behind. Mekas feels a need to stress this point, beginning with the
title of the film repeating the word “lost” three times. His statement is
also an acknowledgment of the therapeutic nature of filming, as a healer
of the hurts created by the loss of important things; he thus places his
work within the broader tradition of autobiographical practices under-
stood as “narrative recovery.”37
 210JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

Visually, urban public spaces are less dominant in Reel 3, but Mekas’s
voice-over continues to invoke the street as the dominant chronotope,
reflecting a mood that wavers between loneliness or nostalgia and his
efforts to build a new life. His recollections shift between a sense of new-
ness expressed early in this reel (“The city, the people, everything was
new. We walked through the city, we submerged in it.” [65’]) and his ear-
lier feelings of loneliness, now expressed in the third person: “He was
very shy and very lonely during this period. He used to take long, long
walks. He felt very close to the park, to the streets, to the city” (67’). The
urban settings compete now with new scenes of the countryside, but
New York City is still the main space: not only its streets, but also its
parks, especially Central Park. Nevertheless, the meaning of these public
spaces gradually changes. Mekas needs time to make himself at home in
this new land, and he spends time getting to know these places, “sub-
merging” himself in them. The space thus becomes almost a co-
protagonist, a companion that Mekas needs to get to know better if he is
to begin again. He even establishes a dialogue with it at the end of Reel 3:
“We were driving back to New York that day, with Bellamy. I was looking
at the landscape. I knew I was in America. What am I doing here, I asked
myself. There was no answer. The landscape didn’t answer me” (88’). We
have to wait until Reel 5 to find that answer.
Following a structure that in a sense mirrors the first two reels, Mekas
devotes most of Reel 4 to footage of different political activities in New
York. He joins demonstrators against air raid tests, picketers at the wom-
en’s prison on Eighth Street, and various activities of a strike for peace
held in 1962. The street remains the main chronotope, but this time
Mekas moves away from the more domestic approach of Reels 1 and 3,
making room for the public life that engulfs him in his new milieu.
Mekas is again the “watcher” of Reel 2, going out into the streets of New
York to record it all. He reflects on this in the voice-over, expressing a
kind of impulsive, unrationalized need: “I do not know if I’ve under-
stood you. . . . I was just a passer-by, from somewhere else, from com-
pletely somewhere else, seeing it all, with my camera, and I recorded it, I
recorded it all. I don’t know why” (91’). He needs to get to know his new
place and its people—and the camera is his tool to approach them. He
does not feel completely at home there, but he keeps coming back
because, as he explains later, “I wanted to feel its pulse, to feel its
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST21 1

excitement” (97’). Mekas as autobiographical subject is struggling

between the centripetal and centrifugal forces that Bergland identifies as
distinctive trends in ethnic autobiographies, borrowing Bakhtin’s well-
known metaphor.38 He needs to feel part of New York life, but his atten-
tion turns to the alternative social and political struggles of that time.
One of those struggles, the night march of the strike for peace that
Mekas shows toward the end of Reel 4, becomes a kind of metaphor for
the changes that are taking place in his own life. Mekas makes this
explicit when he comments on the images of the people marching: “So let
me continue. I don’t want to look back. Not yet, or not anymore. Ahead,
ahead” (104’). Through the images and the voice-over, the street seems to
incorporate a goal, a destination, fusing the spatial and temporal dimen-
sions. In this way, the street is more like a road, a symbol of the course of
a life, as Bakhtin explains in his description of the road as a key chrono-
tope of the novel form: “Time, as it were, fuses together with space and
flows in it (forming the road); this is the source of the rich metaphorical
expansion on the image of the road as a course.”39 The incorporation of a
direction (the people marching), of a goal (literally a political one), thus
changes the axiological implications of the street, which until now was
the place of the lonely wanderer, to make it more like a road, symbolizing
a direction in life, pointing to a new meaning in Mekas’s struggle. This
street/road here becomes, as Bakhtin also describes it, the space of socio-
historical heterogeneity, of the collapse of social distances, helping
Mekas fully embrace his new country and share its goals.40

MEKAS IN THE NEW YORK ART AND

FI LM COMMUN ITY: REELS 5 A N D 6

The change experienced by Mekas finds its full expression in Reels 5 and
6, which portray a kind of rebirth that gives him a sense of stronger self-
confidence in his future. This change of mood is translated gradually
into a new daring and experimental style that explores camera speed,
lighting, focus, and movement, in a jazz-like fashion. The structure of
these two reels is also less dependent on chronological time, moving
away from a strictly historiographical (and therefore microhistorical)
 212JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

approach toward an exploration of personal identity through a more

poetic and experimental approach. This is revealed very clearly in the
two most distinctive sequences of Reel 5: the twelve-minute sequence
titled “RABBIT SHIT HAIKUS,” and the shorter, four-minute “FOOL’S
HAIKUS” sequence. In the first one (115’–127’), Mekas adopts a nonchro-
nological structure using very short scenes of visual motifs related to
nature, separated by numbers, and with the voice-over stating the same
word three times, evoking the three-verse format of the haiku. Some of
the images are not very different from others used in previous reels, but
their organization and the voice-over give these haiku sequences a non-
narrative, nonchronological quality that liberates the film from its home
movie look and links it more clearly to the modes of avant-garde cinema.
The “FOOL’S HAIKUS” sequence (132’–136’) has a similar tone and the
same structure, with brief numbered scenes, although this time the pat-
tern of stating the same word three times is absent and most of the sec-
tions feature Mekas himself and various female friends of his, walking or
joking around in different parts of Central Park.
Mekas’s new confidence is reflected in a different chronotope in these
last two reels. Now “nature”—understood spatially, associated with the
countryside, with the rural space—becomes the dominant chronotope.
The temporal dimension of the events portrayed in these final reels has
less relevance than in previous reels. This makes sense since the chrono-
tope of nature is associated now with “paradise,” a place where there is
no time but eternity. This idea also echoes the idyllic chronotope pro-
posed by Bakhtin in literature.41 For Bakhtin, in a narrative of this type,
space is the main axis, articulated around familiar sites, full of details of
everyday life. Time acquires a cyclical rhythm associated with folk tradi-
tion. And human life is linked to the life of nature, connected by “the
unity of their rhythm, the common language used to describe phenom-
ena of nature and the events of human life.” 42 Mekas’s approach in Reel 5
mirrors this idyllic chronotope clearly, with nature becoming a visual
metaphor for his newfound harmony.
Different strategies mark this change of chronotope in Reel 5. In the
voice-over, Mekas talks metaphorically about the uselessness of a road
through a poetic tale that evokes his own struggle. The story, told twice,
is about a man who wanted to know what was at the end of the road, and
“when later, many years later, after many years of journey he came to the
end of the road, there was nothing, nothing but a pile of rabbit shit”
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST21 3

(127’). The conclusion—that “the road leads nowhere”—is not experi-

enced as a failure, but rather as a deconstruction of a temporal under-
standing of personal identity in favor of a spatial understanding. Because
Mekas does find a new identity, although it is one associated with a para-
dise regained, that place of happiness that he lost after his departure
from Lithuania. This paradise is defined visually through his commu-
nion with nature, inextricably linked to childhood and playing. The
beginning of Reel 5, with his stay at Stein’s house in Vermont, introduces
this change. But it is most evident in the two haiku sequences of this reel.
Mekas uses a clear nonnarrative structure to underline the experience
of paradise, a space not marked by temporality, since the goal is already
reached. The reconstruction of paradise is underlined in the “RABBIT
SHIT HAIKUS” sequence with the repetition of the word “childhood” in
four of the haiku entries, illustrated by different visual motifs, among them
Mekas’s childlike behavior playing the accordion and running through
snowfields (see figure 7.4). In the “FOOL’S HAIKUS” sequence, despite a
change of location (Central Park), again we can see the playfulness of the

FIGURE 7.4 Lost, Lost, Lost. Mekas playing the accordion in the snow (section 20 of
“RABBIT SHIT HAIKUS”).
 214JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

characters, “making fools” of themselves, as Mekas says, celebrating a

new happiness through the attitudes of childhood.
These themes point to what David E. James considers to be the basic
narrative of Mekas’s diary films: “the attempt to regain Lithuania, a mis-
sion that has several components whose isomorphism and fungibility
supply the massive energy of Mekas’ myth.” 43 According to James, this
myth is constructed on various complementary levels: the recovery of
the mother, of the organic village community, of the rural scene, and of a
cultural practice appropriate to it. These ideas are recognizable in
Mekas’s first diary film, Walden, which James is referring to, but they are
also noticeable throughout Reminiscences and Lost, Lost, Lost. In Remi-
niscences, Mekas is reunited with his mother and revisits the childhood
and youth he left behind when he had to flee in 1948, albeit with the bit-
tersweet taste of someone who is aware of the fleeting nature of the fam-
ily reunion and the impossibility of returning permanently to his birth
country. In Lost, Lost, Lost, they are evident again, with the same frame-
work of a narrative told by a displaced person, marked by exile, but who
now overcomes his exilic condition through the integration of the values
of nature and countryside associated with his birthplace into his new
home.
This integration is closely related to Mekas’s understanding of film-
making, linked to the “folk art” that he saw reflected in the filmmakers
who work with small-gauge formats (8 mm, 16 mm).44 As James rightly
points out, Mekas distanced himself both from the industrial mode of
film production and from the modernist avant-garde, and embraced a
type of filmmaking inspired by folk art, which he appropriated from the
home movie mode to articulate a personal perspective.45 This unique
symbiosis of a folk art at the service of such a personal style was already
conveyed masterfully in the main section of Reminiscences, with its
visual and narrative experimentation fusing with the nature and the
people of Semeniškiai, its direct gazes to the camera, its scenes and land-
scapes unchanged with the passage of time, and its traditional songs
sung to the tune of an accordion. Now, Lost, Lost, Lost achieves a fusion
that evokes this same symbiosis, but that has a more direct relationship
with the process of Mekas’s integration into his new country, which
transcends a conventional sociopolitical explanation to engage more
directly with cultural and artistic parameters.
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST21 5

This process is expressed in Reel 6 through its emphasis on Mekas’s

role as a filmmaker, stressing his understanding of paradise as being
regained through culture, mainly through cinema. The main parts of
this reel—a trip to the Flaherty Film Seminar and a visit to Stony Brook,
New York, on Long Island—reflect an intense fusion of his filmmaking
practice with the playful engagement with nature already shown in
Reel 5. His trip to the Flaherty Seminar in Vermont, together with some
friends (including avant-garde filmmakers Ken and Florence Jacobs),
becomes an act of vindication of Mekas’s work as a filmmaker, while also
introducing an ironic commentary on the documentary film industry.
Rejected by the Flaherty Seminar, Mekas and his friends stand outside as
the true guardians of filmmaking, “the monks of the order of cinema,”
wrapped up in their sleeping blankets as if they were religious habits,
with a soundtrack of chiming bells and Gregorian music reinforcing the
metaphor (146’–148’). Meanwhile, we see Mekas (filmed by Ken Jacobs)
moving around freely with his camera, filming the flowers in the grass as
a visual celebration of this new order of cinema. Paradise has been
regained, and Mekas celebrates it in his interplay with nature as seen
through the lens of his Bolex camera.
The presence of Ken Jacobs and other people of New York’s indepen-
dent and avant-garde film community gives the film a new dimension
(which is also present in other diary films by Mekas), as a chronicle of
this artistic world that emerged in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s.
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Mekas (along with his brother
Adolfas) played an active role in the promotion of this filmmaking com-
munity, founding the magazine Film Culture (1954), and then leading or
forming part of the group that established the Film-Makers’ Cooperative
(1962), published the manifesto of the New American Cinema movement
(1960), and created the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque (1964), which in
1970 became the Anthology Film Archives. In those years, Mekas created
a network of relationships with filmmakers and artists who pursued
careers in this more alternative environment, including some figures
who had a huge media impact, such as Andy Warhol, John Lennon, and
Yoko Ono. In parallel with the promotion of these initiatives, Mekas
continued making his film diaries, in which many of these filmmakers,
artists, and writers would appear, because they formed part of the film-
maker’s everyday interactions. As a result, when these film diaries were
 216JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

subsequently turned into diary films, they constituted a unique chroni-

cle of the New York film community.
This chronicle was completed in other diary films by Mekas, which
also frequently combine everyday scenes of his family with others show-
ing people and activities in the film community, often blurring the
boundary between the two worlds. Jeffrey Rouf highlights this blurry
boundary when he describes Mekas’s films as “the home movies of the
avant-garde,” arguing that his diaries are constructed as genuine home
movies “produced by, for, and about the avant-garde community.” 46 This
may perhaps be an overstatement, because Mekas’s diary films do not
have such an exclusive focus on the avant-garde community and because,
as noted above, they transcend a typically home movie approach to con-
struct an autobiographical narrative articulated in films with an artistic
personality of their own. The French scholar Laurence Allard takes a
more nuanced view of this relationship when she describes Mekas’s
films—which she links to the work of Stan Brakhage—as a personal oeu-
vre that brings home moviemaking and experimental filmmaking
together.47 The similar way that these two filmmakers have of making
and understanding films reveals a close kinship between these two
apparently opposed cinematic modes, as Allard explains: both home
moviemaking and experimental film have a family air that makes out-
siders uncomfortable watching them, as they contain a biographical con-
nection between “author,” “actors,” and audience; moreover, these audi-
ences meet at private exhibition venues, thereby creating “communities
of communication” and restricted interpretation, which in the case of
Mekas (or Brakhage) are communities by virtue of an artistic affinity.48
This particular chronicle of New York’s artistic community that
Mekas offers in Lost, Lost, Lost can be understood in microhistorical
terms, along the lines posited for the analysis of the first part of the film,
although now applied much more loosely. The film maintains a reduced
scale of observation, with an especially fragmentary structure in keeping
with its diaristic nature, which does not provide significant historical
contextualization but instead assumes a basic knowledge of the general
context. In this sense, as Allard suggests, it offers an experience similar
to that of home movies, as only those who belong to this “family” of the
New York film community or who know it well can really appreciate the
appearance of its members, even when they are not named by Mekas in
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST21 7

the film. Nevertheless, with the elements provided fairly explicitly in the
film, it is possible to put together a kind of microhistorical chronicle of
New York’s independent and avant-garde film community. The first
member of this community to be featured in the film first appears in
Reel 2: the Lithuanian painter George Maciunas, who also immigrated to
the United States at the end of the 1940s. Mekas filmed a gathering of
friends in Maciunas’s house in the early 1950s, years before he became
famous as the founder of the Fluxus movement.49 The poet and film-
maker Storm de Hirsch and her husband, Louis Brigante, also a film-
maker, already appeared in Reel 3, but they appear again in this last
reel. De Hirsch was one of the founding members of the Film-Makers’
Cooperative, along with the Mekas brothers and Ken Jacobs and his wife,
Florence. Mekas actually dedicates an important sequence in Reel 5 and
another in Reel 6 to the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. In the first appears P.
Adam Sitney, the most influential scholar of the American avant-garde,
who is also identified by name in the intertitles (see figure 7.5). In Reel 6,

FIGURE 7.5 Lost, Lost, Lost. P. Adam Sitney, a well-known scholar of the American
avant-garde and experimental film, at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.
 218JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

the experimental filmmaker Ed Emshwiller appears, along with images

from the premiere of Twice a Man, a film by George Markopoulos
released in 1963. Ken and Florence Jacobs also have an important pres-
ence, both in the long sequence of the trip to the Flaherty Seminar and in
the Stony Brook sequence (described below), not only as participants in
the trip but also through the images taken by them and included by
Mekas in the film, in the only two scenes where he uses footage not
filmed by himself or his brother.50 As all this makes clear, over the course
of the film Mekas develops a portrait of the New York film community
that is attuned to a microhistorical perspective, as he seeks to offer an
alternative to conventional historical chronicles through fragments pro-
vided by the available archival sources, which in this case are his own
film diaries.
Lost, Lost, Lost ends with a section (157’–165’) introduced with its own
intertitle—“A VISIT TO STONY BROOK”—which in a way confirms
the conclusion of the process of Mekas’s integration into his adopted
country. Supported for the second time by the dialogue between Mekas’s
and Ken Jacobs’s footage (which allows us to see Mekas filming and then
to see the result of his work), this sequence underscores Mekas’s autobio-
graphical perspective, with nature as the dominant chronotope. On the
beach in Long Island, surrounded by his friends, with the Gregorian
chant playing again, Mekas remembers the experience as “good”—as
“like being in a church.” Playfulness is the overriding mode in this new
harmony with nature. And once again, nature and cinema merge, in a
very self-conscious sequence where filming parallels enjoying nature and
friendship. The possible contradiction between the harmonic world of
nature and the mechanical mediation of the film apparatus is blurred by
the home movie style of the filming, fusing them into a unique blend,
challenging both the industrial and the avant-garde modes of filmmak-
ing, as James points out.51 Mekas distances himself from industrial nar-
rative cinema with his personal, autobiographical film; however, although
he makes use of some avant-garde film techniques, with a jazz-like, self-
conscious style, he also steers clear of the structural and political varia-
tions of avant-garde cinema that were prominent in the 1960s by fore-
grounding home moviemaking as his dominant stylistic approach.
The last sentences of Mekas’s voice-over in this sequence close the film
with a new reworking of the spatial understanding of his personal quest.
 JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST 21 9

An echo of his exilic condition reappears briefly when he remarks: “Since

no place was really his, no place was really his home, he had this habit of
attaching himself immediately to any place” (162’). But the final note is
positive, since now he is able to create memories of his new life in the
United States: “He remembered another day. Ten years ago, he sat on this
beach.” In this way, Mekas posits a temporal tension in his inner recon-
struction, although always linked to a place: “Again I have memories. I
have a memory of this place. I have been here before. I have really been
here before. I have seen this water before. Yes, I have walked upon this
beach, these pebbles” (164’). These new memories are ultimately not a
sign of his paradise lost in Lithuania, but of his new identity in America,
now embraced with a sense of recovery and hope. Mekas no longer pres-
ents himself as the lonely displaced person of the first reels. He has
regained a home through culture, and from that moment his film diaries
deal with that home and the friends who inhabit it. The final proof of this
change, as Scott MacDonald points out, can be found outside of the nar-
rative, in the completion of the film Lost, Lost, Lost,52 because it reveals
how, some twenty years after shooting this footage, Mekas feels confi-
dent enough to face his work from those early years, editing it to give
shape to this powerful and personal chronicle of exile and rebirth.
This close analysis of Lost, Lost, Lost has shown how the film effec-
tively provides an insightful portrait of the immigrant experience, which
can be read productively from a microhistorical perspective, understood
in a broader but nevertheless truly revealing sense. Mekas constructs a
microhistorical narrative about the community of Lithuanians who
immigrated to the United States after World War II, with a reduced scale
of observation that offers a multifaceted portrait, combining the celebra-
tory routines of this community shown in the visuals with the pain
caused by their uprooting from their native land, expressed mainly in
the voice-over. To this end, the film fuses the hardships suffered by
Mekas and his compatriots as first-generation immigrants with the spe-
cific challenges Mekas faces when he decides first to make film diaries of
that experience and later on to turn those diaries into a decisive testi-
mony of his process of integration into a new country. After deciding to
separate himself from the Lithuanian community, Mekas dedicates the
rest of the film to that process of integration, which is somewhat unique
because it is closely tied to his involvement in the activities of the
 220JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

independent and avant-garde film world. Mekas covers this artistic com-
munity in his film diaries too, offering, in the second part of the film, a
certain chronicle of its people and activities that can also be understood
in a loose sense as microhistorical. In this way, Lost, Lost, Lost contains
an alternative historiographical approach to two different worlds through
the prism of Jonas Mekas’s personal experience, testing the limits of the
microhistorical approach in the film medium.
 EPILOGUE

Looking to the Future

T
he different case studies presented in this book have shown how
documentary films taking microhistorical approaches can help
us to better understand past eras and societies, ranging from
more canonical examples like the work of Péter Forgács (The Maelstrom,
Free Fall, and Class Lot) to more hybrid proposals like Rea Tajiri’s His-
tory and Memory. These films all share the main constituent features of
written microhistory, while adding elements specific to the film medium.
Especially notable among the former is the reduction of the scale of
observation to offer a deeper or complementary understanding of the
past. This change to the scale of observation is adopted with the inten-
tion of being historically representative, connecting the microhistory in
various ways to its macrohistorical contexts. At the same time, the docu-
mentaries analyzed here are usually supported by narrative structures
articulated through personal or family histories. This underscores another
common feature of microhistory: the centrality of human agency. To this
end, the films analyzed generally draw from family archives, with an
emphasis—as may be expected given their audio/visual nature—on
snapshots and home movies, but also using other types of more personal
archives, such as letters or diaries. Family archives tend to be somewhat
limited, and when working with them filmmakers have to adopt some-
thing like the conjectural approach taken for written microhistory,
 222EP ILO GU E

considering both the information the archives provide and the lacunae
evident in them.
Microhistorical documentaries also have some specific features of
their own. Notable among these is the frequent use of autobiographical
approaches as a means of access to the microhistorical past, reinforcing
the role of the protagonists’ personal memory in the reconstruction of
the past and, consequently, their consideration as “histories of the pres-
ent.” In addition, whether or not they include an autobiographical per-
spective, these documentaries often highlight an affective dimension in
their reconstruction of the past, a feature rarely found in professional
history but central to films like The Missing Picture or A Family Gather-
ing. In some cases, they also adopt an essayistic approach that may help
to highlight the temporal indiscernibility and performative nature of
personal memory, in line with a postmodern historiographical approach
that can also be found in certain features of some written microhistory.
Taking into account this framework developed throughout the book,
this epilogue offers some reflections on how the microhistorical docu-
mentary might evolve in the future. The considerable breadth and pace
of current technological changes is having a big impact on professional
history and archival practices as well as on documentary filmmaking.
Indeed, the progressive digitalization of archival sources and the rise of
the Internet—both as a means of access and as a source of information—
have reshaped the concept of archives and even the work methods of
professional historians, sparking intense debate in contemporary histo-
riography over the future of the field and the dimensions and signifi-
cance of a “digital” history in which written documents preserved in
traditional formats are becoming increasingly rare.1
Although a full exploration of this debate is obviously beyond the
scope of this epilogue, it also raises important questions about the future
of the microhistorical documentary. The challenges of the digital turn
have had a more immediate impact on historical documentaries than on
written history, because it has affected not only the sources available and
the research methods but also the format itself, particularly with the
appearance of interactive documentaries (also known as i-docs or web
documentaries), designed specifically for the Internet, using multimedia
elements and nonlinear structures.2 Documentary filmmakers have also
begun experimenting with virtual reality (VR), a technology not yet
 EP ILO GU E223

fully developed for documentary making, but which might offer some
original perspectives.3 Also worthy of consideration are the possibilities
offered by educational video games that focus on historical issues,
although their specific objectives place them in the field of historical dis-
semination and they are aimed more explicitly at children and youth.
Nevertheless, there are examples of video games that imitate elements of
filmic styles and narratives, which at first glance appear to adopt some-
thing of a microhistorical approach. Such is the case with 1979 Revolu-
tion: Black Friday (2016), which provides information on the events of
the Iranian Revolution by turning the player into a protagonist, under-
scoring the centrality of human agency in the study of history.4 Yet this
could not be said to be a truly microhistorical approach, as the protago-
nist of the game is a fictional character that serves as a channel of access
to the macrohistorical events of the revolution. The innovative feature,
inherent in the dynamic of video games, is the way it connects historical
knowledge to the player experience, as if the player is simply one more
character in this public history, supported by links to short texts that
provide the game play with historical context.5 In any case, predicting
the future of formats based on new technologies is no easy task in an era
of such rapid changes. The fragile nature of multimedia platforms, in
terms of both access (with so many websites becoming inaccessible after
a few years) and software (whose designers may eventually stop main-
taining it6), points to one of the serious problems affecting mainly inter-
active documentaries, a format that includes works of historiographical
value, but whose promising future is often jeopardized when technologi-
cal changes render these works inaccessible.
Beyond questions of accessibility, interactive documentaries offer
some noteworthy narrative and expressive options that are not possible
in linear documentaries, resulting in interesting approaches that can be
described as microhistorical. This is the case, for example, of A Polish
Journey (2016).7 In this i-doc, the multimedia environment allows its cre-
ator, Julian Konczak, to bring together three different expressive chan-
nels (structured around seven episodes): the audiovisual pieces he has
created (which can also be viewed together as a linear documentary on
YouTube); a photo journal of the places he and his son visit, created by
his son; and the macrohistorical context, explained in short texts, which
can be expanded to a fourth level with links to these subjects on
 224EP ILO GU E

Wikipedia (except for the first episode), telling us the history of the more
than 200,000 Polish soldiers who fought alongside the British army, only
to find at the end of the war that Poland was to be left under Stalin’s con-
trol, forcing most of them to live the rest of their lives in exile. At the
center of this i-doc are the audiovisual pieces, which have a clear autobi-
ographical dimension, due not only to the filmmaker’s autodiegetic nar-
ration but also to their central theme: the story of his father, a Pole who
enlisted in the German army after his country was invaded, then deserted
and fought with the Allies, and finally ended up in exile in Scotland,
where he got married and lived the rest of his life. Konczak recounts the
basic elements of this story, but he focuses more on the places and the
feelings, imbuing his work with a powerfully poetic quality in keeping
with the primacy of the personal mnemonic journey that characterizes
his i-doc. His son’s photo journal strays even further from a conventional
historical approach to place the focus on the landscapes and his personal
relationship with these locations. With such different approaches, A Pol-
ish Journey does not quite manage to integrate the microhistorical narra-
tive, based on Konczak’s journey into his father’s past using filmic lan-
guage, and the macrohistorical context, which is presented in standard
written texts supported by historical explanations on Wikipedia. It is
true that the i-doc begins with Konczak’s discovery of his father’s Nazi
German army identity book (the Soldbuch), which constitutes a promis-
ing link between the two scales of observation; however, this connection
turns out not to be as central as the spectator might expect, weakening
the dialogue between the macro- and microhistorical scales.
Where i-docs may offer a more promising avenue for the microhis-
torical documentary is in the creation of collective portraits, because in
such cases they can provide access to each of the protagonists and to
their presentation together in a collective portrait on the same website—a
possibility that linear documentaries cannot offer. A noteworthy exam-
ple of this approach is Hidden like Anne Frank (2010), which explores the
lives of Jewish children hidden during the Nazi occupation of the Neth-
erlands. The project was also published as a book, compiling fourteen
first-person testimonies.8 As interactive documentary, it features twenty-
two stories accessible via each person or via a map showing the routes
taken by the children, who were often forced to change hiding places.
Each personal history also combines text, photos, written documents,
 EP ILO GU E225

and short audiovisual pieces with the testimonies of the protagonists,

illustrated with animation. Although its interactive structure is relatively
simple, this project clearly offers an interesting microhistorical perspec-
tive on the Shoah, set in the same geographical location as The Mael-
strom, but in this case through a collective portrait exploring the personal
experiences of Jewish children, constructed using a range of sources and
expressive forms, including the protagonists’ own oral testimonies. In a
creative decision that is undeniably surprising, the creators do not offer
these testimonies in the form of filmed interviews, limiting our visual
knowledge of the protagonists to a few pictures of their childhood and a
contemporary photo that closes each story.
Another interactive documentary that offers a powerful collective
portrait of a past era from a microhistorical perspective is Jerusalem, We
Are Here (2016).9 This i-doc offers a virtual tour around the streets of
Katamon, a wealthy, predominantly Christian Arab neighborhood of
Jerusalem, whose inhabitants fled or were expelled in the 1948 war.
Jerusalem, We Are Here is presented more immediately as an exploration
of the locations, shown on three different routes with different stops, and
even including a map with the history of the buildings in the neigh-
borhood. But each stop constitutes a foray into the past using different
types of archival sources—photographs, home movies, press clips—
complemented by contemporary oral or filmed testimonies. This creates
a rich and complex palimpsest of archival sources, expressive elements,
and historical scales, clearly dominated by a microhistorical approach,
but always in dialogue with its macrohistorical context, as is also evi-
denced by the starting and ending points shared by all three routes: the
former Regent Cinema (now operating as Lev Smadar Theater) and
St. Simeon Monastery. Presented by three “tour guides” (two Palestinian
and one Jewish, Dorit Naaman, who is also director and co-producer),
the i-doc recounts the history of different places and houses of Katamon,
and of the families who lived there in the past. These stories are always
presented with a short text accompanied by audio or video, usually nar-
rated by the former inhabitants of the homes or their descendants. In
some cases, the videos show these descendants trying to visit their
homes, although they are often refused access. Other videos depict the
present situation of the former inhabitants, such as in the moving short
piece (on “Route 3”) made by Ranwa Stephan, which shows her father
 226 E P ILO GU E

tending his garden, while in a voice-over she reflects on her status as an

exile: “I inherited exile from my parents. . . . Palestinian, Christian, I was
born in Beirut and raised in France. Nobody is like me. I have neither
territory nor community.” And, thinking of her father, she adds: “Noth-
ing will bring back his Palestine, the lost paradise of his childhood,
snatched away by history.” This clearly echoes some of the themes ana-
lyzed in chapter 6, particularly in the film A World Not Ours, told from
the point of view of the exilic condition of a Palestinian filmmaker, but
also in My Land Zion, in relation to the “abandoned” Palestinian house
near Motti Golani’s mother’s home.10 On the whole, Jerusalem, We Are
Here also manifests more fully than any linear microhistorical docu-
mentary the idea of a collage or mosaic made with “miniatures” to form
societal patchwork structures, which is advocated by Alf Lüdtke for tell-
ing histories of everyday life, as explained in chapter 1.11
Parallel to the debate over the forms that the microhistorical docu-
mentary might take in coming years is the debate about the future of
archives and, more specifically, family archives. Archivists are tackling
the digital turn from various angles, although the discussion tends to
center on the preservation of written documents and the consequences
of their transformation to digitalized form, including the risk that docu-
ments that are not digitalized will be consigned to oblivion. Another
important line of debate is related to preservation methods for native
digital sources, whose future access raises many questions (as was men-
tioned above in relation to i-docs). These native digital sources range
from public websites to personal correspondence, which has shifted
almost entirely from written letters to emails or conversations on social
media. This issue directly affects personal and family archives, which, as
discussed in chapter 2, are very common sources for microhistorical
documentaries. The speed and immediacy of personal communication
in the digital era has undermined the document status acquired by writ-
ten correspondence, which families once were often in the habit of pre-
serving. The same phenomenon has affected the family snapshot. With
the smartphone replacing the camera, photographs have lost their value
as documents and have become images created mainly for sharing on
social media. This has resulted in the progressive disappearance of fam-
ily albums and photo collections (traditionally stored in shoeboxes,
unclassified but always retrievable), in the confidence that all photos
 E P ILO GU E227

taken will be available forever at no charge in the “cloud,” when in reality

the latest commercial or technological turn could deprive families of
access to that cloud or force them to pay for it.
In the specific area of home movies, technological changes have
occurred extraordinarily quickly, especially since the 1980s with the mass
distribution of VHS cameras, followed by camcorders using various for-
mats (Video8, Hi8, Digital8, MiniDV, memory cards), and finally the
current smartphones with their increasingly sophisticated cameras. The
current proliferation of videos taken with cell phones has brought us into
an age of mass reproduction of both private and public events, but the
preservation of those recordings seems to be of little concern to nonpro-
fessional users, once again naively confident that they will enjoy perma-
nent access to whatever they have stored in the cloud. In this context,
filmmakers who decide to take a microhistorical perspective on the
recent past may have access to audiovisual family archives that are much
more abundant than they ever were before. The unknown factor lies pre-
cisely in the accessibility of these audiovisual archives for future genera-
tions, which was more assured in the era of analog film and photography,
despite the more limited nature of the material.
The omnipresence of smartphones as recording devices has also
blurred the line between the private or family sphere and the public
sphere. On the one hand, countless family images are shared on widely
accessible social media platforms, while on the other hand, public events
are constantly being recorded on smartphones, sometimes serving as
whistleblowing tools. Ever since the infamous case of the arrest of Rod-
ney King in Los Angeles in 1991, filmed on a neighbor’s camera, home
videos have become a common source of spontaneous news stories and
have been used to denounce dictatorial regimes or expose human rights
violations. One well-known example of the importance of cell phone
recordings in the development of historical events was their use during
the so-called Arab Spring, both for mobilizing local populations and for
spreading news of the popular uprising and its subsequent repression to
the outside world. It is interesting to note that part of the work of
archiving and disseminating the audio/visual documents of the uprising
has relied on multimedia platforms like the website Vox Populi, which
describes itself as “archiving a revolution in the digital age.” This website
actually includes a specific section titled “Archives,” which contains
 228EP ILO GU E

numerous photos, videos, press articles, works of graffiti, and legal docu-
ments, related mainly to the events of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and
its aftermath.12
These very same events are the subject of an interactive documentary
created by Alisa Lebow in 2018, Filming Revolution, self-described as a
“meta-documentary,” based chiefly on interviews with Egyptian film-
makers, activists, and archivists who reflect on the role and meaning of
making films in times of revolution, supplemented with short analytical
reflections by Lebow herself, a well-known documentary scholar.13 In the
section titled “History + Memory,” she suggests that “it was well under-
stood that the material shot during the events of the revolution could one
day be used to write that history. The Mosireen archive would be the
prime vehicle for such a writing, and the history that would emerge will
certainly tell a very different story than what the government has been
attempting to recount.”14 But what she finds even more striking is that
although the interviews were conducted one or two years after the events,
“the impression was that history was alive in daily practice, as the mate-
rials from the archive actively participate in defining the terms of the
present and the future.” And referring to one of the projects examined,
she points out that “the archive is not just a repository of memory, it is a
tool for the intervention in history . . . that continually undermines the
authoritarian methods in which dominant narratives are crafted, and
takes the power out of the hands of the officials.”15 These assertions might
be dismissed as somewhat utopian given the historical development of
events in Egypt, where the popular uprising that ousted Mubarak from
power was followed just three years later by the installment of a regime
similar to Mubarak’s, with another military strongman, Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi, in the president’s chair. Indeed, Lebow seems to acknowledge this
when she concludes: “While this may appear to be an unrealized ideal,
never fully accomplished by any one project, these archival projects
when seen in aggregate do offer an alternative view of this history and
many alternatives for its writing.” The underlying idea is the possibility
of writing a “crowd-sourced history,” based on different recordings made
both by professional filmmakers and by ordinary people. In this sense,
this proposal could be interpreted as a literal case of “history from
below,” not only in terms of its objects of study but also in terms of the
people recording and providing the archival material.
 EP ILO GU E229

Lebow is pointing to a trend that Luke Tredinnick also identifies in

his reflection on the making of history in the digital era, characterized
by an immediacy that threatens to close the gap between the historical
trace and the written history, which has always been such an inherent
feature of any process of professional history: “In contemporary culture,
the past and the present, the record and the history are converging. The
past has saturated the present, and the two exhibit complex interaction
in an already historicized present. This occurs because of the immediacy
of the digital record.”16 Tredinnick applies this thesis to historical events
such as the death of Princess Diana or the September 11 terrorist attacks,
which became “instant history,” characterized by “the immediacy of the
interaction between media representation and public consumption.”17
This has effectively collapsed a distinction that was basic to the disci-
pline, which requires a space between the original moment and its writ-
ing as history: “The immediacy of digital culture means that the record is
already written in the moment of its experience, already understood as a
property of mediation, already framed by the conventions of representa-
tion and narrative, and the conventions of history.”18
Although both Lebow and Tredinnick offer a perhaps excessively
polemical view of contemporary history in the digital era, the two
authors share an understanding of history clearly in line with the “his-
tory of the present” explored in chapter 1, which to different degrees
characterizes the microhistorical documentaries analyzed in this book.
It is a history closely linked to the mnemonic experience of its protago-
nists, who are often still alive, and to the different records of their recent
past. In this sense, it would seem reasonable to expect that microhistori-
cal documentaries—whether they adopt linear or interactive formats—
will become more prominent in the near future. They have the advantage
of naturally allowing a stronger interaction between a diverse range of
digital records (written, audio, photographic, and audiovisual; personal,
family, and public), usually with a process of historicization undertaken
quite soon after the events, as has been observed in the films analyzed in
this book.
 FILMOGR APHY

5 Broken Cameras (‫)ﺧﻤﺲ ﻛﺎﻣﻴ ﺮات ﻣﺤﻄﻤﺔ‬. 2011. Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi
Angelos’ Film. 1999. Péter Forgács
Another Land (‫)תרחא ץרא‬. 1998. Amit Goren
The Bartos Family. 1988. Péter Forgács
A Bibó Reader. 2001. Péter Forgács
The Bishop’s Garden. 2002. Péter Forgács
Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy (Bophana, une tragédie cambodgienne). 1996. Rithy Panh
Bourgeois Dictionary. 1992. Péter Forgács
Carta a un padre. 2013. Edgardo Cozarinsky
Class Lot. 1997. Péter Forgács
The Danube Exodus. 1998. Péter Forgács
Diary (‫)ןמוי‬. 1983. David Perlov
The Diary of Mr. N. 1990. Péter Forgács
Dimona Twist (‫)טסיווט הנומיד‬. 2016. Michal Aviad.
Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell (Duch, le maître des forges de l’enfer). 2011. Rithy Panh
Dusi & Jenő. 1988. Péter Forgács
El misterio de los ojos escarlata. 1993. Alfredo J. Anzola
El Perro Negro. 2005. Péter Forgács
Exile Family Movie. 2013. Arash T. Riahi
A Family Gathering. 1989. Lise Yasui and Ann Tegnell
Filming Revolution. 2018. Alisa Lebow
For My Children (‫)ילש םידליל‬. 2002. Michal Aviad
Free Fall. 1996. Péter Forgács
From a Silk Cocoon. 2005. Stephen Holsapple, Emery Clay III, and Satsuki Ina
GermanUnity@Balaton. 2011. Péter Forgács
 23 2FILM O GRAP H Y

Hacer patria. 2007. David Blaustein

Hidden Like Anne Frank. 2010. Marcel Prins, Peter Henk Steenhuis, and Marcel van der Drift
History and Memory. 1991. Rea Tajiri
Hunky Blues. 2009. Péter Forgács
I Am Von Höfler. 2008. Péter Forgács
I for India. 2005. Sandhya Suri
Israel: A Home Movie (‫)וניאר ךכ‬. 2012. Eliav Lilti and Arik Bernstein
Jerusalem, We Are Here (‫ ﻧﺤﻦ ﻫﻨﺎ‬،‫)ﻳﺎ ﻗﺪس‬. 2016. Dorit Naaman
Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido. 1987. Carlos Echeverría
Kádár’s Kiss. 1997. Péter Forgács
La línea paterna. 1994. José Buil and Marisa Sistach
Letter Without Words. 1998. Lisa Lewenz
Los rubios. 2003. Albertina Carri
Lost, Lost, Lost. 1976. Jonas Mekas
M. 2007. Nicolás Prividera
The Maelstrom. 1997. Péter Forgács
Meanwhile Somewhere . . . 1940–1943. 1994. Péter Forgács
Mémoire d’outremer. 1997. Claude Bossion
Miss Universe 1929. 2006. Péter Forgács
The Missing Picture (L’image manquante). 2014. Rithy Panh
My Brother (‫)ילש חאה‬. 2007. Yulie Cohen
My Land Zion (‫ןויצ‬, ‫)יתמדא‬. 2004. Yulie Cohen
My Terrorist (‫)ילש לבחמה‬. 2002. Yulie Cohen
The Notebook of a Lady. 1994. Péter Forgács
Out of Love . . . Be Back Shortly (‫)בושא ףכית—הבהא שפחל יתאצי‬. 1997. Dan Katzir
Papá Iván. 2000. María Inés Roqué
Picturesque Epochs. 2016. Péter Forgács
A Polish Journey. 2016. Julian Konczak
Private Century (Soukromé století). 2006. Jan Kikl
Private Chronicles: Monologue (Частные хроники. Монолог). 1999. Vitaly Manskij
Rabbit in the Moon. 1999. Emiko and Chizu Omori
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. 1972. Jonas Mekas
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (S21: La machine de mort Khmere rouge). 2003. Rithy Panh
Simply Happy. 1993. Péter Forgács
Something Strong Within. 1994. Robert Nakamura and Karen L. Ishizuka
Updated Diary (‫)ןכדועמ ןמוי‬. 1999. David Perlov
Venom. 2016. Péter Forgács
Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? 1992. Janice Tanaka
Wittgenstein Tractatus. 1992. Péter Forgács
The Women Pioneers (‫)תוצולחה‬. 2013. Michal Aviad
A World Not Ours (‫)ﻋﺎﻟ ٌﻢ ﻟﻴﺲ ﻟﻨﺎ‬. 2012. Mahdi Fleifel
Y in Vyborg (Hetket jotka jäivät). 2005. Pia Andell
Yidl in the Middle. 1999. Marlene Booth
Zahra. 2009. Mohammed Bakri
 NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. Efrén Cuevas, ed., La casa abierta: El cine doméstico y sus reciclajes contemporáneos,
Madrid: Ocho y medio, 2010. The whole book as well as the original English texts of
some of the chapters are available at https://efrencuevas.com/books.
2. Efrén Cuevas, “Microhistoria y cine documental: Puntos de encuentro,” Historia
Social, no. 91 (2018): 69–83; Efrén Cuevas, “Change of Scale: Home Movies as Micro-
history in Documentary Films,” in Amateur Filmmaking: the Home Movie, the
Archive, the Web, ed. Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (London:
Bloomsbury, 2014), 139–51; Efrén Cuevas, “Home Movies as Personal Archives in
Autobiographical Documentaries,” Studies in Documentary Film 17, no. 1 (2013): 17–29;
Efrén Cuevas, “The Immigrant Experience in Jonas Mekas’s Diary Films: A Chrono-
topic Analysis of Lost, Lost, Lost,” Biography 29, no. 1 (2006): 55–73.

INTRODUCTION

1. Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman,

2006), 86.
2. The information on the number of monographs is mentioned by Robert Rosenstone in
his article “Reflections on What the Filmmaker Historian Does (to History),” in Film,
History and Memory, ed. Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry (London: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2015), 188.
3. Tiziana M. Di Blasio, Cinema e storia: Interferenze e confluenze tra due scritture
(Rome: Viella, 2014); Mia E. M. Treacey, Reframing the Past: History, Film and Televi-
sion (London: Routledge, 2016). These monographs also reflect the effects of language
 234INTRO D U CTIO N

barriers: Di Blasio barely cites any works in English not translated into Italian, while
Treacey similarly omits works not translated into English. These barriers are also evi-
dent in the exclusion from both monographs of research published in languages like
Spanish. In the specific case of Spain, this field has developed significantly, particu-
larly thanks to the work of José María Caparrós, who created the Centro de Investig-
ación Film-Historia in 1983 and launched a journal with the same name in 1991.
4. Bolesław Matuszewski, “A New Source of History: The Creation of a Depository for
Historical Cinematography,” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, ed.
Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 520. First published
in French as Une nouvelle source de l’histoire (Paris: Imprimerie Noizette, 1898).
5. Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1988), first pub-
lished in French as Cinema et histoire (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1977); Pierre Sorlin,
The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). A few years
earlier, Sorlin had published another seminal work in this field, Sociologie du Cinéma:
Ouverture pour l’histoire de demain (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1977).
6. Paul Smith, ed., The Historian and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011); Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, with a second edition in 2012 pub-
lished by Routledge.
7. See, for instance, chapter 3 in Rosenstone, History on Film, 32–49.
8. Sorlin, Film in History, 3.
9. John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson, American History/American Film: Inter-
preting the Hollywood Image, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1991), xx.
10. Antoine de Baecque, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), 356–59.
11. Robert B. Toplin, “The Filmmaker as Historian,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5
(1988): 1226.
12. Robert Rosenstone, “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibil-
ity of Really Putting History onto Film,” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988):
1173–85.
13. Rosenstone, History on Film, 37.
14. Rosenstone, History on Film, 159.
15. Rosenstone, History on Film, 160.
16. Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” American Historical Review 93,
no. 5 (1988): 1193.
17. White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” 1194.
18. Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry, “Introduction,” in Film, History and Mem-
ory, 6.
19. Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film
(London: Routledge, 2007). The Toplin article cited above, “The Filmmaker as Histo-
rian,” also focuses on documentary films in its brief analysis of different case studies.
20. See Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 33–38.
 1. MICROHISTO RY AND DOCUMENTARY FILM235

21. There are various reasons for the interest that these films have aroused in film studies,
but there is little evidence, at least in the more restricted field of documentary studies,
of a keen interest in documentaries that have an exploration of the past as a central
concern. Apart from specific studies of individual films, it is worth noting here the
chapter by Ann Gray, “History Documentaries for Television,” in The Documentary
Film Book, ed. Brian Winston (London: BFI Publishing, 2013), and the special issue on
documentary and history, edited by Marcius Freire and Manuela Penafria, in the Por-
tuguese journal Doc on-line, no. 15 (2013), http://doc.ubi.pt/index15.html.
22. See Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Post-
modern History,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern
Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (London: Routledge, 1996), 201–18.

1. MICROHISTORY AND DOCUMENTARY FILM

1. The arguments presented in the middle part of this chapter were originally posited in
a previous article of mine, published in Spanish, “Microhistoria y cine documental:
Puntos de encuentro,” Historia Social, no. 91 (2018): 69–83.
2. John Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social
History 7, no. 1 (2010): 92.
3. Juan Gracia Cárcamo, “Microsociología e historia de lo cotidiano,” Revista Ayer,
no. 19 (1995): 189.
4. Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2001), 19.
5. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 21.
6. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 24–25.
7. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 27.
8. Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life”; and Harry D. Harootu-
nian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday
Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), particularly chapter 2, “The ‘Mys-
tery of the Everyday:’ Everydayness in History.”
9. Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” 99.
10. Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms (Leiden:
Brill, 2009), 33.
11. Georg Simmel, “Sociological Aesthetics,” in The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other
Essays (New York: Teachers College, 1968), 69.
12. David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel,
Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 271.
13. Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” 99.
14. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 461,
N2,6. Matti Peltonen explores this connection between Benjamin and microhistory in
“Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” His-
tory and Theory 40, no. 3 (2001): 353–55.
 2 3 6 1. M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CUMEN TA RY FI LM

15. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 71.

16. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 105.
17. For a more detailed analysis of the role of cinema in Benjamin’s thought, see Daniel
Mourenza, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Uni-
versity Press, 2020).
18. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1982), 238.
19. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 89.
20. For an analysis of these texts in the context of everyday life studies, see Nurçin Ileri,
“The Distraction and Glamour of Everyday Life in The Salaried Masses and The Mass
Ornament,” Journal of Historical Studies, no. 5 (2007): 83–93.
21. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75.
22. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1960), 304.
23. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Structure of the Historical Universe,” in History, the Last
Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 104–38.
24. Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It,” Critical
Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 27.
25. Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” 90.
26. Alf Lüdtke, ed., History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and
Ways of Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). The German edition
was published the same year: Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfah-
rungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt: Campus, 1995).
27. Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1988). Originally published as L’eredità immateriale: Carriera di un esor-
cista nel Piemonte del seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1985); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and
the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1992). Originally published as Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mug-
naio del ‘500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).
28. Brad S. Gregory, “Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life,”
History and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999): 100.
29. Gregory, “Is Small Beautiful?,” 103. These connections are even revealed in some of
the titles of the publications, like the book edited by Winfried Schulze, Sozialge-
schichte, Alltagsgeschichte und Mikro-Historie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Rupre-
cht, 1994).
30. Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’echelles: La micro-analyse à la expérience (Paris: Seuil/Gal-
limard, 1996); Hans Medick, “Mikro-Historie,” in Schulze, Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsge-
schichte, Mikro-Historie, 40–53; Justo Serna and Anacleto Pons, Como se escribe la
microhistoria: Ensayo sobre Carlo Ginzburg (Madrid Cátedra, 2000), which was
revised and updated in a new edition published in 2019: Microhistoria: Las narracio-
nes de Carlo Ginzburg (Granada: Comares); Carlos A. Aguirre, Microhistoria italiana:
Modo de empleo (Caracas: Fundación Centro Nacional de Historia, 2009); Sigurður G.
Magnússon and István Szíjártó, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (London:
 1 . M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O C U M E NTA RY FI LM237

Routledge, 2013). For a more exhaustive bibliography of microhistory, see the website
www.microhistory.eu.
31. Celso Medina, “Intrahistoria, cotidianidad y localidad,” Atenea, no. 500 (2009): 123–39.
32. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage
Books, 1963).
33. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 21.
Giovanni Levi questioned this approach for its relativism, which he argued is more
obvious in the work of Geertz’s followers than of Geertz himself. See Giovanni Levi,
“On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 103–9; Levi, “I pericoli del geertzismo,” Quaderni
storici 20, no. 58 (1985): 269–77; Levi, “Antropologia y microhistoria: Conversación
con Giovanni Levi,” Manuscrits, no. 1 (1993): 22.
34. Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” 100.
35. Emmanuel Le Roy, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294–1324
(London: Penguin, 2013). Originally published as Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à
1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
36. Edoardo Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni Storici 12, no. 35 (1977):
506–20. On Barth and microhistory, see Paul-André Rosetal’s chapter, “Construire le
‘macr’ par le ‘micro:’ Fredrik Barth et la microstoria,” in Revel, Jeux d’echelles, 141–59.
37. Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and
the Historiographical Marketplace,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe,
ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991), 1–10. Originally published in Quaderni storici, no. 40 (1979), 181–90. With differ-
ent nuances, discussion of this division between social and cultural microhistory can
be found in Magnússon and Szíjártó, What Is Microhistory?, 17–18; Justo Serna and
Anacleto Pons, “Formas de hacer microhistoria,” Agora: Revista de Ciencias Sociales,
no. 7 (2002), http://www.uv.es/~jserna/Fhm.htm; and Jacques Revel, “Micro-analyse
et construction du social,” in Jeux d’echelles, 19–30. An abridged English version of
Revel’s chapter can be found in “Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social,” in
Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New
York: New Press, 1995), 492–502.
38. Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2001), 115–17.
39. This outline of the basic features of microhistory is based on the works cited previ-
ously, and, in particular, for their comprehensive vision of the field, on Serna and
Pons, Como se escribe la microhistoria; and Magnússon and Szíjártó, What Is
Microhistory?
40. Revel, “Micro-analyse et construction du social,” 19.
41. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004), 212.
42. Magnússon and Szíjártó, What Is Microhistory?, 50–53. Here Szíjártó cites the expres-
sion “incidental analysis” coined by Darton in the New York Review of Books 51, no. 11
(June 24, 2004): 60–64.
 2 3 8 1. M IC RO H ISTO RY AND D O CUMEN TA RY FI LM

43. Magnússon and Szíjártó, What Is Microhistory?, 63–64

44. Levi, “Antropologia y microhistoria,” 17.
45. Levi, “Antropologia y microhistoria,” 17.
46. Levi, “Antropologia y microhistoria,” 18. Ginzburg poses a similar argument on the
relationship between microhistory and local history in “Acerca de la historia local y la
microhistoria,” published in Spanish in Tentativas (Morelia, Mexico: Universidad
Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2003), 253–68. Originally published in Italian
in 1985.
47. Ginzburg and Poni, “The Name and the Game,” 5–8.
48. Levi, “On Microhistory,” 110.
49. Levi, “On Microhistory,” 111.
50. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,”
History Workshop Journal 9, no. 1 (1980): 5–36. First published as “Spie: Radici di un
paradigma indiziario,” in Crisi della ragione, ed. Aldo Gargani (Turin: Einaudi, 1979).
51. Carlo Ginzburg, “Proofs and Possibilities: Postscript to Natalie Zemon Davis, The
Return of Martin Guerre,” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2012), 70. Originally published as an epilogue to the Italian
edition of The Return of Martin Guerre, 1984. Davis’s book was originally published in
English by Harvard University Press, also in 1984.
52. Ginzburg explores this narrative dimension of history in his postscript to Davis’s The
Return of Martin Guerre. See “Proofs and Possibilities.”
53. See, for example, Carlo Ginzburg, “Montrer et citer, La vérité de l’histoire,” Le Débat,
no. 56 (1989), 43–54; Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in Probing the Limits of Represen-
tation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’ ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1992), 82–96; and Ginzburg, “Microhistory,” specifically point
15 (31–32). Levi makes similar arguments directed against relativism without actually
labeling it as postmodernist. See, for example, his “On Microhistory” and “Antropolo-
gia y microhistoria.”
54. Serna and Pons, Como se escribe la microhistoria, 223. The authors dedicate a whole
chapter, titled “AntiWhite” (177–230), to analyzing Ginzburg’s rejection of White’s
theories. In the recent updated version of that study, Microhistoria: Las narraciones de
Carlo Ginzburg, the chapter has been retitled “Contra el escepticismo” [“Against Skep-
ticism”] (75–98). This is a matter that is closely tied to the question of how to under-
stand the role of narration in historiography. On this point, see, for example, Ann
Rigney, “History as Text: Narrative Theory and History,” in The SAGE Handbook of
Historical Theory, ed. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (London: SAGE, 2013), 183–201.
55. Kracauer, History, the Last Things Before the Last, 122.
56. Revel, “Micro-analyse et construction du social,” 36.
57. Natalie Z. Davis, Slaves on Screen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000), 6.
58. Andrej Slávik, “Microhistory and Cinematic Experience: Two or Three Things I Know
About Carlo Ginzburg,” in Microhistories, ed. Magnus Bärtås and Andrej Slávik
(Stockholm: Konstfack, 2016), 61.
 1. MICROHISTO RY AND DOCUMENTARY FILM239

59. Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” 101.

60. Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” 101.
61. Carlo Ginzburg, “Historia y microhistoria: Carlo Ginzburg entrevistado por Mauro
Boarelli,” Pasajes: Revista de pensamiento contemporáneo, no. 44 (2014): 91.
62. To be precise, Ginzburg refers on a few occasions to The Triumph of the Will in a talk
he gave in 1982 on film as a historical source. Although this talk contains interesting
references to the relationship between history and film, he does not specifically
explore the relationship between microhistory and documentary film. See Ginzburg,
“De todos los regalos que le traigo al Kaisare . . . Interpretar la película, escribir la his-
toria,” Tentativas, 197–215. Originally published in Italian as “Di tutti i doni che porto
a Kaisire . . . Leggere il film scrivere la storia,” Storie e storia 5, no. 9 (1983): 5–17.
63. See Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 34–38.
64. Levi, “On Microhistory,” 110. Ginzburg also identifies these features as microhistori-
cal. See Ginzburg, “Microhistory,” 32.
65. Dan Sipe, “The Future of Oral History and Moving Images,” Oral History Review 19,
no. 1–2 (1991): 75–87; Michel Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Mean-
ing of Oral and Public History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990),
chaps. 6 and 7. In film studies, see Cahal McLaughlin, “What Happens When an
Interview Is Filmed? Recording Memories from Conflict,” Oral History Review 45,
no. 2 (2018): 304–20.
66. Argentine documentary films, and more specifically those that deal with the victims
of forced disappearances during the last dictatorship, are worthy of a case study of
their own, as there are documentaries that have explored these issues with a wide
range of approaches. Some examples include Papá Iván (María Inés Roqué, 2000), in
which family letters play a central role, and Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003), which
has a more performative and experimental approach.
67. Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Postmod-
ern History,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event,
ed. Vivian Sobchack (London: Routledge, 1996), 201–18.
68. Rosenstone, “Future of the Past,” 206.
69. Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005).
70. Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Docu-
mentation to Intervention (London: Routledge, 2016).
71. See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 87, 386, 498.
72. Julio Arostegui, “Retos de la memoria y trabajos de la historia,” Pasado y memoria,
no. 3 (2004): 23–24. A reasonably comprehensive analysis of the relationship between
memory and history can be found in chapter 2 of Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Mem-
ory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
73. For a more detailed study of personal memory in film, see María del Rincón, Marta
Torregrosa, and Efrén Cuevas, “La representación fílmica de la memoria personal: Las
películas de memoria,” ZER 22, no. 42 (2017): 175–88. We apply this approach to one of
 24 0 1. M ICRO H ISTO RY AND D O CUMEN TA RY FI LM

Alan Berliner’s films in “The Representation of Personal Memory in Alan Berliner’s

First Cousin Once Removed,” Studies in Documentary Film 12, no. 1 (2018): 16–27.
74. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), 65–83.
75. Cubitt, History and Memory, 125.
76. This raises the complex question of how collective or social memory works, an issue
that has called for greater attention since the first theories on social memory were
proposed in the seminal works of Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la
mémoire (1925), and Frederic Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and
Social Psychology (1932).
77. See Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2002), 95–119.
78. Alisa Lebow, First Person Jewish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xii.
79. Lebow, First Person Jewish, xv.
80. Lane, Autobiographical Documentary in America, 96.
81. Juliette Goursat, Mises en “ je”: Autobiographie et film documentaire (Aix-en-Provence:
Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2016), 145–90.
82. Goursat studies four Chilean documentaries more thoroughly in the chapter: En
algún lugar del cielo (2003), Mi vida con Carlos (2009), El edificio de los chilenos (2010),
and Rue Santa Fe (2007).
83. José Van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 21.
84. See Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture
After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 29–54.
85. “History of the present” refers here to the concept proposed by historians like Henry
Rousso and Julio Arostegui, which differs from the concept given the same name by
Foucault, associated with his genealogical approach. For an explanation of the Fou-
cauldian concept, see David Garland, “What Is a ‘History of the Present’? On Fou-
cault’s Genealogies and their Critical Preconditions,” Punishment & Society 16, no. 4
(2014): 365–84.
86. Julio Arostegui, “Ver bien la propia época (Nuevas reflexiones sobre el presente como
historia),” Sociohistórica, nos. 9–10 (2001): 39.
87. Henry Rousso, The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3.
88. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?,
vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14.

2. THE ARCHIVE IN THE MICROHISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY

1. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2,
nos. 1–2 (2002): 93, 94.
2. Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, “Exploración, experiencia y emoción de archivo: A modo de
introducción,” Aniki 2, no. 2 (2015): 220.
 2 . T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICA L DOCUMEN TA RY241

3. Terry Cook, “Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth: Postmodernism and the

Practice of Archives,” Archivaria, no. 51 (2001): 27.
4. Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” portal: Librar-
ies and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 14.
5. Cook, “Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth,” 27.
6. George Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 100, 101.
7. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 101. See Carlo Ginzburg, Rapports de force:
Historie, rhétorique, prevue (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 33–34.
8. Jeannette A. Bastian, “Moving the Margins to the Middle: Reconciling ‘the Archive’
with the Archives,” in Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and Theories, ed.
Fiorella Foscarini et al. (London: Facet Publishing, 2016), 7.
9. Bastian, “Moving the Margins to the Middle,” 7.
10. Ruth Rosengarten, Between Memory and Document: The Archival Turn in Contempo-
rary Art (Lisbon: Museo Coleçao Berardo, 2012); Anna M. Guasch, Arte y archivo
1920–2010: Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades (Madrid: Akal, 2011); and
Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art (London:
Whitechapel, 2006). See also special issues of the journals Visual Resources (vol. 18,
no. 2, 2002) and Archives and Records (vol. 36, no. 1, 2015).
11. Philip Rosen, “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Con-
cepts,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (London: Routledge, 1993), 71.
12. Catherine Russell, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 18.
13. Emma Cocker, “Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives,” in Cultural Bor-
rowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, ed. Iain R. Smith (Nottingham,
UK: Scope, 2009), 99–100.
14. Cocker, “Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives,” 100.
15. The growing importance of personal archives in archival studies has resulted in an
increase in specialized publications. See, for instance, the special issues published in
Archivaria in 2001 (no. 52) and 2013 (no. 76), the book edited by Christopher A. Lee,
I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era (Chicago: Society of American Archi-
vists, 2011), or Penny Summerfield’s book Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and
Historical Practice (London: Routledge, 2018). Summerfield’s book includes chapters
dedicated to the analysis of letters, diaries, autobiographies, and oral histories as basic
sources for histories of the self.
16. Anna Woodham et al., “We Are What We Keep: The ‘Family Archive,’ Identity and
Public/Private Heritage,” Heritage & Society 10, no. 3 (2017): 210. The authors point out
an interesting distinction between the “collection,” as a term more typical of institu-
tional archives, and the family archive, which they explore through a bottom-up
approach: “A family archive is not necessarily considered to be a typical collection,
since its growth may be more fluid, informal and ad-hoc instead of a deliberate and
‘active’ process of acquisition and curation” (207).
17. See Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1987); James M. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home
 24 2  2 . T H E ARCH IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTOR I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 44– 63; Ryan Shand,
“Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities,” Moving Image 8,
no. 2 (2008): 51–57; and Tom Slootweg, “Home Mode, Community Mode, Counter
Mode: Three Functional Modalities for Coming to Terms with Amateur Media
Practices,” in Materializing Memories: Dispositifs, Generations, Amateurs, ed.
Susan Aasman, Andreas Fickers, and Joseph Wachelder (London: Bloomsbury,
2018), 208– 9.
18. It is not my intention here to underplay the value of the contributions made to the
specific study of snapshots, which include, apart from numerous articles in journals,
books such as Jo Spence and Patricia Holland, eds., Family Snaps: The Meanings of
Domestic Photography (London: Virago, 1991); Marianne Hirsch, ed., The Familial
Gaze (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999); and Catherine Zuroms-
kis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
Zuromskis offers a good overview of research on snapshots in “Snapshot Photography:
History, Theory, Practice and Aesthetics,” in A Companion to Photography, ed. Stephen
Bull (Chicester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 291–306.
19. José Van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 115. The author is referring explicitly here to photographs taken with
cell phones, but her argument could easily be extended to include contemporary home
movies, also recorded with cell phones.
20. See Shand, “Theorizing Amateur Cinema,” 51–57; Slootweg, “Home Mode, Commu-
nity Mode, Counter Mode,” 210–12.
21. For an exploration of the features of amateur film, see, for example, Ian Craven, ed.,
Movies on Home Ground: Exploration in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle, UK: Cam-
bridge Scholar Publishing, 2009), particularly the introduction written by Craven, “A
Very Fishy Tale: The Curious Case of Amateur Subjectivity.” The boundaries with
experimental film are hazier, as various experimental filmmakers, such as Maya
Deren or Stan Brakhage, advocate amateur or home modes and small-gauge filming,
although their films exhibit marked differences from amateur practices in terms of
their creation and distribution processes.
22. This autobiographical dimension and the fruitful relationship between home movies
and autobiographical films is analyzed in more detail in my chapter, “Del cine
doméstico al autobiográfico: Caminos de ida y vuelta,” in Cineastas frente al espejo,
ed. Gregorio Martín Gutiérrez (Madrid: T&B, 2008), 101–20.
23. The development of digital technology, with the use of cell phones as cameras and the
distribution of filmed content on social networks and websites, has somewhat blurred
this distinction between home movies and amateur films. For an exploration of this
issue, see Susan Aasman, “Everyday Complexities and Contradictions in Contempo-
rary Amateur Practice,” in Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures: Film, Video,
and Digital Media, ed. Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Susan Aasman (London:
Routledge, 2019), 44–64.
24. Charles Tepperman, Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking,
1923–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 175, 191. The distinction
between the two modes is even more pronounced in the films analyzed by Tepperman,
 2 . T H E A R C H IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTO RICA L DOCUMEN TA RY243

since he focuses his research mainly on what he calls “serious” or “advanced” amateur
filmmakers, who compete in the main amateur film festivals.
25. Patricia R. Zimmermann, “The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts,” in
Mining the Home Movies: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen Ishizuka
and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 5.
26. Zimmermann, “Home Movie Movement,” 18.
27. Roger Odin, “Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-pragmatic
Approach,” in Ishizuka and Zimmerman, Mining the Home Movies, 265–66.
28. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2.
29. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 130. Foucault touches on this idea a little earlier in the
same book: “We have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish
statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and
things (with their own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of state-
ments (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive” (128).
30. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang,
1982), 89.
31. A standard reference for this view of home movies as constructions imbued with a
patriarchal gaze is the Michele Citron film Daughter Rite (1979), and her subsequent
reflection on the film in the first chapter of her book Home Movies and Other Neces-
sary Fictions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
32. Alf Lüdtke, “What Is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?,” in
History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed.
Alf Lüdtke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 21.
33. Lüdtke, “What Is the History of Everyday Life,” 14.
34. Carolyn Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust,”
American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (2001): 1177.
35. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 101.
36. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 167.
37. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,”
History Workshop Journal 9, no. 1 (1980): 5–36.
38. This section takes up the main ideas outlined in an earlier article of mine: “Home
Movies as Personal Archives in Autobiographical Documentaries,” Studies in Docu-
mentary Film 17, no. 1 (2013): 17–29. In the final section of this chapter, I also occasion-
ally return to some of the questions raised in that article.
39. Julia J. Noordegraaf and Elvira Pouw, “Extended Family Films: Home Movies in the
State-sponsored Archive,” Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2009): 97.
40. Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of
History (London: Routledge, 2014).
41. Baron, Archive Effect, 82. This is more obvious when the sense of transgression is fore-
grounded, as in the cases of Capturing the Friedmans or Tarnation, where the film-
makers are using controversial family footage. Baron’s astute criticism of Tarnation
fits very well into her analytical framework, suggesting that the openly voyeuristic
approach of this film turns us into “archival peeping toms” (99).
 24 4  2 . T H E ARCH IVE IN TH E M IC RO H ISTOR I CA L DOCUMEN TA RY

42. Baron is also aware of the impact of this temporal disparity, which often produces not
only an “archive effect” but also an “archive affect,” an emotional effect linked to a feel-
ing of loss (21) and to an awareness of the passage of time (128).
43. Rebecca Swender, “Claiming the Found: Archive Footage and Documentary Prac-
tice,” Velvet Light Trap, no. 64 (2009): 3–10.
44. Swender, “Claiming the Found,” 6.
45. Swender, “Claiming the Found,” 7–8.
46. Swender, “Claiming the Found,” 5–6.
47. Paul J. Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 175–82.
48. Odin, “Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document,” 263.
49. Lüdtke, “What Is the History of Everyday Life,” 21.
50. Ben Highmore, “Questioning Everyday Life,” in Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben High-
more (London: Routledge, 2002), 24–26.
51. Rachael Langford, “Colonial False Memory Syndrome? The Cinémémoire Archive of
French Colonial Films and Mémoire d’Outremer,” Studies in French Cinema 5, no. 2
(2005): 107, 108.
52. Langford, “Colonial False Memory Syndrome?,” 108.
53. Highmore, “Questioning Everyday Life,” 24–26.
54. Lüdtke, “What Is the History of Everyday Life,” 21.
55. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), xiv.
56. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiv–xv.
57. Edward Muir, “Introduction: Observing Trifles,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples
of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1991), ix–x.
58. Van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, 21.
59. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 3.
60. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cam-
bridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 93.
61. Hirsch, Family Frames, 22.

3. PÉTER FORGÁCS’S HOME MOVIE CHRONICLE

OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

1. Despite its wide distribution on institutional circuits, Forgács’s work is not available
on DVD (with the exception of Hunky Blues) or on online platforms.
2. Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, eds., Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
3. Michael Renov, “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other Self,’” in
Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1999), 140–55.
 3 . P É TE R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE245

4. Sven Spieker, “At the Center of Mitteleuropa: A Conversation with Peter Forgács,”
ARTMargins, April 21, 2002, https://artmargins.com/at-the-center-of-mitteleuropa-a
-conversation-with-peter-forgacs/.
5. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 299. (Interview reprinted in Nichols
and Renov, Cinema’s Alchemist, 3–38.)
6. MacDonald, Critical Cinema 4, 300.
7. Jacques Revel, “Micro-analyse et construction du social,” in Jeux d’echelles: La micro-
analyse à la expérience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1996), 19.
8. Roger Odin, “How to Make History Perceptible: The Bartos Family and the Private
Hungary Series,” in Nichols and Renov, Cinema’s Alchemist, 139. Published originally
as “La Famille Bartos de Péter Forgács, ou comment rendre l’histoire sensible,” in
Cinéma hongrois: Le temps et l’histoire, ed. Kristian Feigelson (Paris: Presses Sor-
bonne Nouvelle, 2003).
9. Ruth Balint, “Representing the Past and the Meaning of Home in Péter Forgács’s Pri-
vate Hungary,” in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, The Archive, The Web, ed.
L. Rascaroli, G. Young, and B. Monahan (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 194; Balázs
Varga, “Façades: The Private and the Public in Kádár’s Kiss by Péter Forgács,” in Past
for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums
After 1989, ed. Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor (Budapest: Central European Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 89. Kristian Feigelson also points to a related question in passing
when he connects Forgács’s films to a “history from below” in his article “The Laby-
rinth: A Strategy of Sensitive Experimentation, a Filmmaker of the Anonymous,”
KinoKultura, no. 7 (2008), http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/7/feigelson.shtml.
10. Julio Arostegui, “Ver bien la propia época (Nuevas reflexiones sobre el presente como
historia),” Sociohistórica, nos. 9–10 (2001): 38–39.
11. Henry Rousso, The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 192.
12. Numerous authors have analyzed the stylistic and narrative features of Forgács’s
films. See, for example, Richard Kilborn’s chapter, “‘I Am a Time Archaeologist’: Some
Reflections on the Filmmaking Practice of Péter Forgács,” in Rascaroli, Young, and
Monahan, Amateur Filmmaking, 179–92.
13. Bill Nichols, “The Memory of Loss: Péter Forgács’s Saga of Family Life and Social
Hell,” Film Quarterly 56, no. 4 (2003): 7. (Interview reprinted in Nichols and Renov,
Cinema’s Alchemist, 39–55.)
14. Miguel Ángel Hernández-Navarro, Materializar el pasado: El artista como historiador
(benjaminiano) (Murcia: Micromegas, 2012), 19–21.
15. Hernández-Navarro, Materializar el pasado, 39–42. This author actually mentions
Forgács’s films explicitly as an example of the second strategy, although he does not
delve into an analysis of his films.
16. See Hernández-Navarro’s chapter, “Walter Benjamin y las imágenes de la historia,” in
Materializar el pasado, 45–76. These questions are discussed in various works by Ben-
jamin, the main source being his Arcades Project.
 24 6  3 . P ÉTER FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVI E CHR ON I CLE

17. Forgács would make another film with footage taken outside of Europe: Venom, which
uses footage filmed in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s.
18. The interviews are not conducted directly by Forgács; instead, the filmmaker uses
interviews conducted in the early 1960s by Elemér Bakó, a Hungarian linguist living
in the United States who at that time was able to interview the first generation of Hun-
garian immigrants—then in their twilight years—who had arrived in the country at
the beginning of the century. Information provided by Péter Forgács in a personal
interview on March 4, 2020.
19. The fact that the Shoah has been studied so extensively in contemporary historiogra-
phy is also reflected in the amount of attention it has received in film studies, although
fewer studies have been dedicated to its representation in documentaries. Among
monographs published in English, only one focuses exclusively on documentary films:
Brad Prager, After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Other books about the Holocaust in film include both
fictional and documentary accounts: Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the
Holocaust, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Joshua Hirsch,
Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2003); Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documen-
taries, and Experimental Films (New York: Continuum, 2011); and Gerd Bayer and
Oleksandr Kobrynskyy, eds., Holocaust Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Images,
Memory, and the Ethics of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press/
Wallflower Press, 2015).
20. Michael Renov, “Historical Discourses of the Unimaginable: Peter Forgacs’ The Mael-
strom,” in Nichols and Renov, Cinema’s Alchemist, 86. Originally published in Ger-
man as “Historische Diskurse des Unvorstellbaren: Peter Forgacs’ The Maelstrom,”
Montage AV 11, no. 1 (2002): 27–40.
21. Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István Szíjártó, What Is Microhistory? Theory and
Practice (London: Routledge, 2013), 63–64.
22. Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the
Historiographic Marketplace,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward
Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 1–10.
23. This is a strategy that he maintains throughout the film, even for the Seyss-Inquarts’
home movies in black and white, which are also tinted blue. There is one curious
exception in the blue-tinted sequence of a local swimming race filmed by Max, shown
close to the start of the film. Footage in color, however, is shown without chromatic
alterations.
24. A similar but inverted strategy is used a little later, when we see images from an NSB
training camp, while in a voice-over we hear a speech by the Dutch queen in exile in
London.
25. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York:
Viking Press, 1963).
26. Ernst Van Alphen, “Towards a New Historiography: Péter Forgács and the Aesthet-
ics of Temporality,” in Resonant Bodies, Voices, Memories, ed. Anke Bangma et al.
 3 . P É TE R FO RGÁC S ’S H O M E M OVIE CHR ON I CLE247

(Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2008), 98. Reprinted in Nichols and Renov, Cinema’s
Alchemist, 59–74.
27. Spieker, “At the Center of Mitteleuropa.”
28. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang,
1982), 96. Emphasis in original.
29. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. Emphasis in original.
30. Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biog-
raphy,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 133.
31. Péter Forgács, “Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal Reflections on Home Movies,”
in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen L.
Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2008), 55.
32. For this analysis I follow the methodology proposed by Gerard Genette for literary
narratives in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1980) and Narrative Discourse Revisited (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1988). Genette’s methodology has been applied to film studies by André Gaud-
reault and François Jost, among others. See Gaudreault and Jost, Le Récit ciné-
matographique: Films et séries télévisées, 3rd. rev. and exp. ed. (1990; Paris: Armand
Colin, 2017).
33. Like other chapters of the Holocaust, the literature on the Hungarian case is extensive.
A good introduction to it is offered on the website for the National Committee for
Attending Deportees, at www.degob.org.
34. Free Fall also includes other related information, such as the expedition of Slovak Jews
who crossed the Danube on their way to Palestine in 1940, a curious digression that
actually offers a brief summary of the story that Forgács would tell two years later in
his film Danube Exodus.
35. A contrast of time frames can also be seen in Forgács’s documentaries that include
interviews with the protagonists, which are combined with home movies of the past,
such as I Am Von Höfler or Miss Universe 1929. But the effect is very different, as it is a
conventional technique to support interviews with related archival footage, even
though in this case it is an archive as unique as the interviewee’s own home movies. A
different case, closer to that of Class Lot, can be found in The Notebook of a Lady, as in
this film the old home movies are contrasted with contemporary images of its pro-
tagonist walking through the gardens of her former palazzo while she speaks to us in
a voice-over. The different time frames—visible in the change from black and white to
color, and in the aging of the building and the protagonist—connect more clearly with
the contrast in Class Lot, although the contemporary image is not an archival image
but filmed specifically for the documentary.
36. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?,
vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 15.
37. Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2001), 21. For
Michel de Certeau’s theory, see The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
 24 8  4 . IN C ARCERATIO N O F JAPANES E AMER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

4. THE INCARCERATION OF JAPANESE

AMERICANS DURING WORLD WAR II

1. The literature on this era refers to both “internment camps” and “concentration
camps.” The second term has generated some controversy due to its association with
the Nazi concentration camps. Karen L. Ishizuka defends its use with a detailed argu-
ment in its favor in the chapter “Coming to Terms,” in her book/catalog Lost and
Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 2006), 154–72.
2. A quite exhaustive list can be found in Densho Encyclopedia, last updated April 2018,
http://encyclopedia.densho.org /Documentary_films/videos_on_incarceration/.
3. Betty Bergland, “Representing Ethnicity in Autobiography: Narratives of Opposi-
tion,” in Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 93.
4. George Lipsitz, Time Passages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990),
213.
5. Jun Xing, Asian America Through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity
(Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1998), 163. This view is partly contested by Taunya
Lovell Banks, who identifies a tendency (albeit not intentional) in many of these docu-
mentaries to reinforce certain stereotypes related to Japanese Americans, thereby
illustrating “the continuing conflict within the Japanese American community
between embracing the model minority stereotype and connecting the internment
to American institutional racism.” Banks, “Outsider Citizen: Film Narratives About
the Internment of Japanese Americans,” Suffolk University Law Review 42, no. 4
(2009): 780.
6. Rocío G. Davis, Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family Mem-
oirs (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 117. Davis’s book analyzes family
stories of Asian Americans mainly in literature, although she dedicates her sixth
chapter to what she calls the “Asian American Family Portrait Documentary.”
7. Ishizuka, Lost and Found, 127.
8. Alf Lüdtke, “What Is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?,” in
History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed.
Alf Lüdtke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 21.
9. Karen L. Ishizuka, “Through Our Own Eyes: Making Movies with Japanese American
Home Movies,” in La casa abierta: El cine doméstico y sus reciclajes contemporáneos,
ed. Efrén Cuevas (Madrid: Ocho y medio, 2010), 217. Available in English at http://
dadun.unav.edu/handle/10171/18498?locale=en.
10. Robert Rosen, “Something Strong Within as Historical Memory,” in Mining the Home
Movies: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R.
Zimmermann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 119.
11. Ishizuka, “Through Our Own Eyes,” 218.
12. Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, “Envoi,” in Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and
Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2, Living and Cooking (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 255.
 4 . IN C A R C E R ATIO N O F JAPANE S E AM E RICA N S DUR I N G WWI I 249

13. Luce Giard, “Introduction to Volume 1: History of a Research Project,” in Certeau,

Giard, and Mayol, Practice of Everyday Life, 2:xxi.
14. See “Producer’s Statement/About the Production,” https://www.fromasilkcocoon.com
/inastatement.html.
15. Letters and diaries are basic sources for the “histories of the self” posited by Penny
Summerfield as historiographical practices. Summerfield analyzes these sources in
the chapters “Historians’ Use of Letters” and “Historians and the Diary” in her book
Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice (London: Routledge,
2018), 22–77.
16. In this case, the parents are actually Nikkei, people of Japanese descent born in North
America but educated mainly in Japan.
17. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After
the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 38.
18. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22.
19. Hirsch, Family Frames, 22.
20. Hirsch, Family Frames, 23.
21. In addition to the documentary and its scholarly commentary, two books deal with
the story of the family: one written by the filmmaker’s father, Robert Shu Yasui, The
Yasui Family of Hood River, Oregon (self-pub., 1987); and another by Lauren Kessler,
Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family (New
York: Random House, 1993).
22. Alisa Lebow, First Person Jewish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008), xii.
23. Cassandra Van Buren, “Family Gathering: Release from Emotional Internment,”
Jump Cut, no. 37, July 1992, https://www.ejumpcut.org /archive/onlinessays/JC37folder
/FamilyGathering.html.
24. Peter X. Feng, Identities in Motion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 17.
25. Feng, Identities in Motion, 17.
26. Roger Odin, “Le film de famille dans l’institution familiale,” in Le film de famille:
Usage privage, usage public, ed. Roger Odin (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1995),
32–33. The invented nature of this memory based on home movies could be associ-
ated with the idea of prosthetic memory proposed by Alison Landsberg, although
this author is referring more to the mass media and mainstream cinema, where
there is no autobiographical relationship between the viewer and the content
viewed. See Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of Ameri-
can Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004).
27. Terry Cook, “Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth: Postmodernism and the
Practice of Archives,” Archivaria, no. 51 (2001): 27.
28. Carlo Ginzburg, “Proofs and Possibilities: Postscript to Natalie Zemon Davis, The
Return of Martin Guerre,” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2012), 70.
 2 50  4 . IN C A RCERATIO N O F JAPANES E AMER I CA N S DUR I N G WWI I

29. Glen M. Mimura, “Antidote for Collective Amnesia? Rea Tajiri’s Germinal Image,” in
Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, ed. Darrel Y. Hamamoto and Sandra
Liu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 157.
30. See Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Post-
modern History,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern
Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (London: Routledge, 1996), 208–9.
31. Rosenstone, “Future of the Past,” 206.
32. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic polyphony in fact serves Peter X. Feng as a start-
ing point for his analysis of documentaries on Japanese Americans in his chapter
“Articulating Silence: Sansei and Memories of the Camps,” in Identities in Motion,
68–100.
33. José Medina, “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory,
Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism,” Foucault Studies, no. 12 (2011): 15.
34. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003), 70.
35. Yankee Doodle Dandy is referenced one last time to reiterate—perhaps a little
redundantly—this same contradiction: the scene shows a group of African Americans
around the statue of Lincoln and a recitation of the end of his famous Gettysburg
Address, which, in the midst of the Civil War, asserted the values of democracy and
freedom as elements of the nation’s identity, while a superimposed caption reminds us
that the year that this Hollywood film was released, the mass internment of Japanese
Americans was taking place just four hundred miles away.
36. See Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, UK: Pearson Long-
man, 2006); and Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univer-
sity Press, 1988).
37. See Janet Walker, “The Traumatic Paradox: Autobiographical Documentary and the
Psychology of Memory,” in Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, ed. Katharine
Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 111, 113.
38. Walker, “Traumatic Paradox,” 109. I will go no further in studying the film from the
perspective of trauma studies than the brief references included here, as it is beyond
the scope of this chapter, which is limited to an analysis of these documentaries as
microhistory. For an exploration of the relationships between image and trauma,
which include documentary films but also photography, fiction film, and other visual
forms of expression, see, for example: Frances Guerin and Robert Hallas, eds., The
Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower
Press, 2007); E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media
and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Nick Hodgin and
Amit Thakkar, eds., Scars and Wounds: Film and Legacies of Trauma (London: Pal-
grave, 2017); and Caterina Albano, Memory, Forgetting and the Moving Image (Lon-
don: Palgrave, 2016), especially its third chapter.
39. As noted in chapter 1, the concept of the “crystal-image” is taken from Gilles Deleuze,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),
65–83.
 5. R IT H Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAP H ICAL N A R R ATI VE251

40. One of the clearest examples of the frailty of the mother’s memory is the scene where
we are shown some images of the canteen at Salinas while she states that there was no
such place at that camp (10’).
41. Marita Sturken, “The Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the
Japanese Internment,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific Wars, ed. T. Fujitani,
Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 37.

5. RITHY PANH’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE

OF THE CAMBODIAN GENOCIDE

1. For an analysis of the presence of the character of Bophana in Rithy Panh’s work, and
especially in Bophana and Duch, see the article by Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, “¿Qué
espera de mí esa foto? La Perpetrator image de Bophana y su contracampo: Icono-
grafías del genocidio camboyano,” Aniki 2, no. 2 (2015): 322–48. For a study of the mug
shots taken at Tuol Sleng and their subsequent use (in archives, museums, etc.), see
Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic
Record in Cambodia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
2. See Elisabeth Beker, “The Romance of Comrade Deth,” in When the War Was Over:
Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (New York: Public Affairs, 1986), 212–25.
3. Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and
the Historiographic Marketplace,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed.
Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991),
1–10.
4. Ginzburg and Poni, “Name and the Game,” 8.
5. Sánchez-Biosca, “¿Qué espera de mí esa foto?,” 332.
6. Leshu Torchin, “Mediation and Remediation: La Parole Filmée in Rithy Panh’s The
Missing Picture (L’image Manquante),” Film Quarterly 68, no. 1 (2014): 36.
7. Deirdre Boyle, “Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory and Re-enactment in Rithy
Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” Frameworks 50, nos. 1–2 (2009):
98, 100.
8. Rithy Panh, L’elimination, with Christophe Bataille (Paris: Grasset, 2012). Published
in English as The Elimination (New York: Other Press, 2013).
9. The film was screened at numerous film festivals, winning several important awards,
including the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes (2013). It also was nominated for the
Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (2014).
10. Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biog-
raphy,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 133.
11. I have simplified the outline of the narrative structure in the interests of keeping the
analysis brief, as a more detailed description would digress from the main focus of
this chapter. As was the case in chapter 3, the narratological terminology used here is
taken from the methodology proposed by Gerard Genette, described in Narrative
 2 52  5. RITH Y PANH ’S AU TO BIO GRAPHI CA L N A R R ATI VE

Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980) and Narra-
tive Discourse Revisited (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), applied here
to film.
12. The concept of “memory film” or “film of memory” has been proposed by various
authors. See, for example, Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011); and David MacDougall, “Films of Memory,” in Transcultural
Cinema, ed. David MacDougall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998),
231–44.
13. See María del Rincón, Marta Torregrosa, and Efrén Cuevas, “La representación
fílmica de la memoria personal: Las películas de memoria,” ZER 22, no. 42 (2017): 175–
88. For a briefer outline in English, subsequently applied to one of Alan Berliner’s
films, see María del Rincón, Efrén Cuevas, and Marta Torregrosa, “The Representa-
tion of Personal Memory in Alan Berliner’s First Cousin Once Removed,” Studies in
Documentary Film 12, no. 1 (2018): 16–27.
14. Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press,
2007), 27.
15. See Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York:
Citadel Press, 1946).
16. Frances Guerin and Robert Hallas, “Introduction,” in The Image and the Witness:
Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, ed. Frances Guerin and Robert Hallas (London:
Wallflower Press, 2007), 4.
17. As I noted in chapter 4 in relation to History and Memory, I do not explore the issues
more closely related to trauma studies further here, as this would go beyond the scope
of this analysis, which focuses on its microhistorical dimension and the consequent
relationships between memory, history, and archives. In addition to the book edited
by Guerin and Hallas mentioned here, in chapter 4 I identified other references that
explore trauma and cinema, such as the books by E. Ann Kaplan, Nick Hodgin and
Amit Thakkar, and Caterina Albano, which are included in the bibliography.
18. The debate between White and Ginzburg was also waged in an area much closer to the
subject matter of Panh’s films, the Jewish genocide, subsequently collected in two
chapters of the book Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solu-
tion,” edited by Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
James E. Young offers a very good summary of this debate and Saul Friedlander’s
mediation of it in his article “Toward a Received History of the Holocaust,” History
and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 21–43.
19. After showing the visit by the Chinese leaders mentioned earlier, Panh concludes this
section by showing three consecutive dioramas (69’) with no specific narrative anchor,
as a visual synopsis of the dramatic consequences of the communist regime in the
Cambodian population: the first pictures his whole family in a frontal pose, with the
clothes they wore before the arrival of the Khmer Rouge; the second shows the same
characters, but now in the black clothes worn by the deportees, some of them now
looking emaciated; the third shows only six of the thirteen original family members,
emaciated and woebegone.
 6. IDENTITIES AND CONFLICTS IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE253

20. See, for example, two key reference works on this topic: Douglas MacDowell, Irony in
Film (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016); and Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers:
Voice- Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989).
21. Carlo Ginzburg, “Proofs and Possibilities: Postscript to Natalie Zemon Davis, The
Return of Martin Guerre,” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2012), 70.
22. There is one scene, however, where this dynamic seems to be inverted, when Panh
recalls his childhood hobby of going to film shoots, invited by a neighbor of his who
was a filmmaker. The dioramas reconstruct these scenes, but suddenly there appears a
film image of a female dancer, who seems to be dancing for the figurine of the boy
Panh, like a fragment rescued from the collective shipwreck caused by the Khmer
Rouge regime (37’).
23. Vicente Sánchez-Biosca, “Challenging Old and New Images Representing the Cambo-
dian Genocide: The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013),” Genocide Studies and Preven-
tion: An International Journal 12, no. 2 (2018): 157. In this article, Sánchez-Biosca
conducts a detailed analysis of the types of images that appear in The Missing Picture,
with special attention to three scenes, including the one dealing with the death of the
children.
24. Stephanie Bou, L’image manquante: Un film de Rithy Panh (Paris: ACRIF-CIP, 2016),
11. Bou suggests these six possible interpretations for the “missing picture”: the archive
of the crime; the lost picture of childhood; the truth of the event; the picture we don’t
want to see; the very life that was stolen; and the split image.
25. It is interesting to note the dual meaning of the film’s title in Spanish, La imagen per-
dida, which could refer both to its physical absence or to its material spoilage; this
dual meaning is missing from its title in French (manquante) and English (missing).
26. Curiously, before moving on to the next scene (at the hospital, filmed with dioramas),
Panh inserts a brief shot of a documentary image of a sick girl (70’); a shocking image,
because it could be interpreted as a visual rectification of the complaint that has just
been expressed.

6. IDENTITIES AND CONFLICTS IN

ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

1. For a broader study of memory and trauma in Israeli cinema (including both fiction
and documentary films), see Raz Yosef and Boaz Hagin, eds., Deeper Than Oblivion:
Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
2. It is worth mentioning here another documentary with a similar approach: Private
Album (2018), directed by Kobi Farag. This film is based on seventeen short interviews
with ordinary people in Israel, who recount scenes of significance to them arranged in
chronological order, from the 1940s through to the present day. The most characteris-
tic feature of the film is that all the interviews are related to snapshots that in one way
 2 54  6 . ID ENTITIE S AND CO NFLIC TS IN ISR A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

or another bring back memories of the past; hence the title Private Album. Although
this points to a microhistorical intention underlying the premise of the film, its struc-
ture (made up of scenes with no connection between them) ends up offering a kaleido-
scopic portrait that distances it from a microhistorical perspective.
3. The film also includes a few scenes that access public history through the perspective
of professional journalism, such as when we see a television screen broadcasting the
historic visit in 1979 of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (90’). Two sequences with
footage filmed by the television journalist Benya Binnun have a similar effect, espe-
cially the second one. The first (59’–62’) shows a Jewish march in 1968 through the
occupied territories, filmed by Binnun with an amateur style. The second (78’–82’)
shows footage of his coverage of the Yom Kippur War. This footage was not included
in the TV news broadcasts, because, as he explains in a voice-over, his interest in
showing close-ups of the combatants, to give the war a human face, clashed with the
official image of the war that the broadcasters sought to convey.
4. Lauren Davidson, “The Selective Memory of ‘Israel: A Home Movie,’” The Tower Mag-
azine, no. 5, August 2013, http://www.thetower.org /article/the-selective-memory-of
-israel-a-home-movie/.
5. Linda Dittmar, “In the Eye of the Storm: The Political Stake of Israeli i-Movies,” in The
Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary, ed. Alisa Lebow
(New York: Columbia University Press/Wallflower Press, 2012), 164.
6. See Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2002), 48–93.
7. Philippe Lejeune, “How Do Diaries End?,” Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 99–112.
8. Quoted in Shai Tsur, “Out of Love . . . Be Back Shortly,” Jerusalem Post, December
11, 1997.
9. Yaron Shemer explores this issue in Amit Goren’s filmography in the context of his
extensive study of Mizrahi cinema in Israel: Identity, Place, and Subversion in Con-
temporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013),
73–75.
10. Yael Munk, “Ethics and Responsibility: The Feminization of the New Israeli Docu-
mentary,” Israel Studies 16, no. 2 (2011): 156.
11. Dittmar, “In the Eye of the Storm,” 162.
12. Dittmar, “In the Eye of the Storm,” 160. The author bases her study on the work,
among others, of Israeli scholar Shmulik Duvdevani, which I have been unable to read
as it is published only in Hebrew.
13. The best-known and most widely quoted revisionist historians, also recognized as pio-
neers of the movement, are Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Simha Flapan, and Avi Shlaim.
A good outline of their position can be found in the article by Shlaim titled “La guerre
des historiens israéliens,” Annales 59, no. 1 (2004): 161–67. English translation at
https://users.ox .ac .uk /~ssfc0005/ The%20War%20of%20the%20Israeli%20Historians
.html.
14. Lisa Polland, “Film Review: My Terrorist and For My Children,” Hawwa: Journal of
Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 3, no. 2 (2005): 277.
 6 . ID E N T IT I ES AND CO NFLIC TS IN IS RAEL A N D PA LESTI N E255

15. The filmmaker is credited in My Terrorist as Yulie Gerstel, the surname of her hus-
band at the time. They were divorced in 2004, and in her next two films her name
appears as Yulie Cohen Gerstel. Since her website currently identifies her as Yulie
Cohen, I have opted to use this name to refer to her here.
16. Yossi K. Halevi, “The Real Dispute Driving the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” The
Atlantic, May 14, 2018.
17. The impact of the Shoah on the State of Israel is not analyzed further here, as it is
beyond the scope of this chapter. For an analysis of its influence on the Palestinian-
Israeli conflict, see Andreas Musolff, “The Role of Holocaust Memory in the Israeli-
Palestinian Conflict,” in The Israeli Conflict System: Analytic Approaches, ed. Harvey
Starr and Stanley Dubinsk (London: Routledge, 2015), 168–80.
18. Yosefa Loshitzky, “Veiling and Unveiling the Israeli Mediterranean: Yulie Cohen-
Gerstel’s My Terrorist and My Land Zion,” in Visions of Struggle in Women’s Filmmak-
ing in the Mediterranean, ed. Flavia Laviosa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 14.
While accepting the sincerity of the filmmaker’s intentions, Loshitzky ultimately clas-
sifies both of Cohen’s films as the product of a “narcissistic self that, despite its critical
aim, remythologizes the Israeli collective political self and its Zionist core” (4).
19. There are also few publications dealing specifically with Palestinian documentary
production. Notable among the few written in English is the chapter by Nurith Gertz
and George Khleifi, “A Dead-End: Road Block Movies” (134–170), included in their
book Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008). The book analyzes Palestinian film production up to 2003,
with an epilogue that includes newer titles up to 2007, which means it does not include
either Zahra or A World Not Ours, which I discuss here, nor does it provide any infor-
mation hinting at other documentaries with microhistorical approaches.
20. Michael Renov, “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other Self,’” in
Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1999), 140–55.
21. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and won
the Berlinale Peace Prize, as well as the Yamagata, Edinburgh, and DOC NYC Grand
Jury Prizes, among other awards.
22. Data from UNRWA, https://www.unrwa.org /who-we-are.
23. Fleifel’s explanation continues: “Instead I wanted to create a feeling of nostalgia for
the old childhood years. I also wanted to make the film like a long episode of The Won-
der Years, a series that I grew up watching as a kid and loved very much. Also Radio
Days by Woody Allen was a big influence. Hence the use of old jazz music.” Personal
interview with the author, February 20, 2020.
24. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 4.
25. The “transnational family” is a concept that has aroused growing academic interest in
the current era of globalization. Debora F. Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela have defined it as
“families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together
and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity,
 2 56  6 . ID ENTITIES AND CO NFLIC TS IN ISR A EL A N D PA LESTI N E

namely ‘familyhood,’ even across national borders.” The Transnational Family: New
European Frontiers and Global Networks (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 3. Exile Family Movie,
directed by Arash T. Riahi, portrays his family divided between Austria and Iran,
using home videos and Skype conversations. In I for India, Sandhya Suri offers a por-
trait of her family based largely on the home movies that her father and his relatives
exchanged between England and India. I explore these types of films, and more specifi-
cally I for India, in Cuevas, “The Filmic Representation of Home in Transnational Fam-
ilies: The Case of I for India,” NECSUS, Autumn 2016, https://necsus-ejms.org/the
-filmic-representation-of-home-in-transnational-families-the-case-of-i-for-india/.
26. The canonical longitudinal documentary is made up of a series, that is, episodes about
the same protagonists at set intervals over a long period of time. One of the best-
known examples is Michael Apted’s Up series, which documents the lives of fourteen
Britons every seven years from their childhood (1964) through to their old age (the last
film was released in 2019). However, the concept can also be applied without stretch-
ing the definition to individual documentaries presenting the same protagonists in
different periods. For a study of the longitudinal documentary and its best-known
examples, see Richard Kilborn, Taking the Long View: A Study of Longitudinal Docu-
mentary (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010).

7. THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN JONAS MEKAS’S

LOST, LOST, LOST

1. This chapter is based in part on an analysis I conducted previously of Lost, Lost, Lost
based on Bakhtin’s theories, but which did not include a study of the film’s microhis-
torical dimension: “The Immigrant Experience in Jonas Mekas’s Diary Films: A Chro-
notopic Analysis of Lost, Lost, Lost,” Biography 29, no. 1 (2006): 55–73. Mikhail Bakhtin
describes his chronotopic approach in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981), 84–258.
2. According to the 1980 U.S. census, there were 743,000 people of Lithuanian descent
living in the country. For a detailed study of this question, see Alfonsas Eidintas, Lith-
uanian Emigration to the United States, 1868–1950 (Vilnius: Mokslo ir Enciklopediju
Leidybos Institutas, 2005).
3. Mekas’s written diary was published in 1991 by Black Thistle Press, under the title
I Had Nowhere to Go. A new edition was published by Spector Books in 2017.
4. Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice
(London: Routledge, 2018), 50–77.
5. Vahé Tachjian, Daily Life in the Abyss: Genocide Diaries, 1915–1918 (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2017).
6. Katherine Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family
in Provincial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
 7. JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST257

7. Paul J. Eakin, “Breaking Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration,” Biography 24,

no. 1 (2001): 115.
8. For a study of the relationships between documentary and the avant-garde in autobio-
graphical films, see my chapter “Diálogo entre el documental y la vanguardia en clave
autobiográfica,” in Documental y vanguardia, ed. Mirito Torreiro and Josetxo Cerdán
(Madrid: Cátedra, 2005), 219–50.
9. Jean Rousset, Le lecteur intime: De Balzac au journal (Paris: Librairie José Corti,
1986), 158.
10. David E. James, “Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden,” in To Free
the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David E. James (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 144–79. James’s categorization refers to
Mekas’s Walden but can be extended to his other diary films.
11. James, “Film Diary/Diary Film,” 161.
12. For a more detailed exploration of the relationship between diary films and home
movies, see Roger Odin, “Du film de famille au journal filmé,” in Je Filme, ed. Yann
Beauvais and Jean-Michel Bouhours (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1995), 1951–
44; and Laurence Allard, “Une reencontre entre film de famille et film expérimental:
Le cinéma personnel,” in Le filme de famille: Usage privé, usage public, ed. Roger Odin
(Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1995), 113–25.
13. Susana Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 97. Egan is talking here about the work
of Jim Lane and Tom Joslin.
14. Jonas Mekas, “The Diary Film (A Lecture on the Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithu-
ania),” in The Avant- Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adam Sitney
(New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), 191.
15. Mekas, “The Diary Film,” 192.
16. Quoted from an interview of Jonas Mekas by Jérôme Sans, published in Just Like a
Shadow, ed. Jérôme Sans (Paris: Patrick Remy Studio, 2000). The book has no
pagination.
17. Mekas, “The Diary Film,” 193.
18. Maureen Turim, “Reminiscences, Subjectivities, and Truths,” in James, To Free the
Cinema, 209. Italics in the original.
19. Philippe Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 2003), 24.
20. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 141. Naficy addresses the diary films of Jonas Mekas
specifically (141–46) as what he calls “letter-films,” presenting them as “an exemplar of
exilic filmmaking,” not only because they depict “exile, displacement, and longing,”
but also because they are “exilically accented” in their style, structure, and mode of
production (141).
21. Turim, “Reminiscences, Subjectivities, and Truths,” 209.
22. The titles in Mekas’s films, usually written in capital letters, are expressed here in the
same format used by Mekas.
 2587. JONAS MEKAS’S LOST, LOST, LOST

23. Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition

and Approach,” in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John
Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 149.
24. James, “Film Diary/Diary Film,” 163.
25. William Boelhower, Autobiographical Transactions in Modernist America: The Immigrant,
the Architect, the Artist, the Citizen (Udine, Italy: Del Bianco Editore, 1992), 28–40.
26. See Michael V. Montgomery, Carnival and Commonplaces: Bakhtin’s Chronotope, Cul-
tural Studies, and Film (New York: Peter Lang, 1993); Vivian Sobchack, “Lounge Time:
Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir,” in Refiguring American Film
Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), 129–70; and Naficy, An Accented Cinema (chaps. 5 and 6). Two other scholars
should be mentioned in this context: Robert Stam, who has also applied Bakhtin to
cinema in Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), although he focuses on issues such as lan-
guage, heteroglossia, carnival, and dialogism; and James M. Moran, who studies the
“home mode” in video and television as a chronotope in chapter 4 of his book There’s
No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
27. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 250. As Sobchack points out, it is important to note
that for Bakhtin these chronotopes were not a mere backdrop to the plot, as they pro-
vide specific markers for the development of the story, limiting its narrative varia-
tions, shaping characterization, and establishing the most significant axiological sites
of the work. Sobchack, “Lounge Time,” 151.
28. Stam refers to this transfer of Bakthin’s ideas to cinema in a brief comment on The Dia-
logic Imagination: “Although Bakthin once again does not refer to cinema, his category
seems ideally suited to it. . . . Bakthin’s description of the novel as the place where time
‘thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible’ . . . seems in some ways more appro-
priate to film than to literature, for whereas literature plays itself out within a virtual, lexi-
cal space, the cinematic chronotope is quite literal, splayed out concretely across a screen
with specific dimensions and unfolding in literal time.” Stam, Subversive Pleasures, 11.
29. Boelhower, Autobiographical Transactions in Modernist America, 23.
30. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 247.
31. According to Mekas’s website (jonasmekas.com), the total duration of the film is 178’.
But the French version on DVD (the one available in Europe) lasts only 165’. This is the
one I have used. It was also used by Francesco Mazzaferro for the discussion in his
article “Jonas Mekas, Between Experimental Cinema and Art Literature: Part Two,”
Letteratura artistica: Cross-cultural Studies in Art History Sources, latest version
April 2019, https://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.com/2018/03/jonas-mekas27.html.
32. Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go; Jonas Mekas, There Is No Ithaca (New York: Black This-
tle Press, 1996).
33. See Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 243–45.
34. Henry Rousso, The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3.
35. Rousso, Latest Catastrophe, 3.
 EPILOGUE259

36. Betty Bergland, “Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject: Reconstructing

the ‘Other,’” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilm-
ore, and Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 159.
37. Several authors have studied autobiography from the point of view of “narrative
recovery.” See, for instance, Suzette A. Henke, who explains it as pivoting “on a double
entendre meant to evoke both the recovery of the past experience through narrative
articulation and the psychological reintegration of a traumatically shattered subject.”
Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), xxii.
38. Bergland, “Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject,” 160.
39. Bakthin, Dialogic Imagination, 244.
40. Bakthin, Dialogic Imagination, 243, 245.
41. Bakthin, Dialogic Imagination, 224, 227.
42. Bakthin, Dialogic Imagination, 226.
43. James, “Film Diary/Diary Film,” 158.
44. See, for instance, Jonas Mekas, “8 mm Cinema as Folk Art,” in Movie Journal: The Rise
of the New American Cinema 1959–1971, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2016), 89.
45. James, “Film Diary/Diary Film,” 159.
46. Jeffrey Rouf, “Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art
World,” in James, To Free the Cinema, 295.
47. Allard, “Une reencontre entre film de famille et film expérimental,” 113–25.
48. A personal anecdote corroborates this family air that Allard associates with Mekas’s
films. In 2001, I was on a short research stay at the Anthology Film Archives. Mekas
had recently finished As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of
Beauty and organized a private screening, to which he invited me. As the film is
almost five hours long, halfway through the screening Mekas interrupted it and
invited the five audience members to a meal, based on the argument that “anyone who
watches my films I consider my friend.”
49. A similar case involves a rather atypical character in this context, Tiny Tim, who
appears at the beginning of Reel 6, in the early 1960s, singing and playing the ukulele,
also years before he became famous for his appearances on American television.
50. Reel 6 also includes a scene with a celebrity: a meeting with Salvador Dalí organized
by Professor Oster, which took place in January 1964.
51. James, “Film Diary/Diary Film,” 159.
52. Scott MacDonald, “Lost, Lost, Lost over Lost, Lost, Lost,” Cinema Journal 25, no. 2
(1986): 32.

EPILOGUE

1. In the extensive literature on these questions, it is worth highlighting two anthologies:

Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, eds., Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann
 26 0 E P ILO GU E

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); and Tony Weller, ed., History in the Digital
Age (London: Routledge, 2013).
2. Regarding i-docs, see, for example: Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose,
eds., I-Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary (New York: Columbia
University Press/Wallflower, 2017); Judith Aston and Stefano Odorico, “The Poetics
and Politics of Polyphony: Towards a Research Method for Interactive Documentary,”
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 15 (2018): 63–93.
3. It is worth noting, however, one “VR documentary” that seems in tune with microhis-
torical approaches: Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel (2016), which reconstructs the Irish
1916 Easter Rising from the perspective of Willie McNeive, a young supporter of Irish
independence from Britain. This VR experience, visually constructed using anima-
tion, is built on McNeive’s eyewitness account, a recording of which lay undiscovered
for decades. The project is presented as offering “a very personal insight into this a key
moment in European history . . . an artistic journey into the memory of an ordinary
man who was swept up into an extraordinary event.” https://vrtov.com/projects/easter
-rising-voice-of-a-rebel/, accessed February 5, 2021.
4. For a more detailed description of the video game, see its Wikipedia entry: https://en
.wikipedia.org /wiki/1979_Revolution:_Black_Friday.
5. Another video game that could be described as taking a microhistorical approach is
Jewish Time Jump: New York (2013). In this game, the player becomes a reporter who
travels a century back in time to learn more about Jewish life in Greenwich Village in
the 1900s. But in addition to being a location-based augmented reality (AR) game only
playable in New York City, its focus is clearly didactic, aimed primarily at school stu-
dents, and with supplementary teaching materials available at https://jwa.org /teach
/jewishtimejump. For more on this project, see Owen Gottlieb, “Who Really Said
What? Mobile Historical Situated Documentary as Liminal Learning Space,” Gamevi-
ronments, no. 5 (2016): 237–57.
6. A clear example of this phenomenon is the large number of i-docs designed using
Flash Player software, which Adobe stopped supporting at the end of 2020, rendering
the documentaries inaccessible from one day to the next. A similar fate befell products
made using the ARIS platform, which has also ceased to function. This was the plat-
form used to create Jewish Time Jump: New York (mentioned above) and other histori-
cal i-docs such as Dow Day.
7. For a more detailed analysis of this i-doc, see “A Polish Journey—A Web-Doc About
Migration and Its Legacy,” http://i-docs.org/a-polish-journey-a-web-doc-about-migration
-and-its-legacy/, accessed March 3, 2021.
8. Marcel Prins and Peter Henk Steenhuis, eds., Hidden Like Anne Frank: 14 True Stories
of Survival (New York: Scholastic, 2014). The interactive project was made by Marcel
Prins, Peter Henk Steenhuis, and Marcel van der Drift. Available at https://
hiddenlikeannefrank .com/, accessed March 10, 2021.
9. “About JWRH,” Jerusalem, We Are Here: An Interactive Documentary, 2018, https://
info.jerusalemwearehere.com/, accessed February 20, 2021
 EP ILO GU E261

10. Jerusalem, We Are Here also connects with the trilogy made by the well-known Israeli
filmmaker Amos Gitai about a house that was abandoned by its Palestinian owner in
1948 and occupied by different Israeli tenants over the years. Gitai made the first film,
House, in 1980, the second, A House in Jerusalem, in 1998, and the third, News from
Home/News from House, in 2005, creating a sort of longitudinal documentary with
the physical space of the house as the element of continuity.
11. Alf Lüdtke, “What Is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?,” in
History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed.
Alf Lüdtke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 21.
12. Lara Baladi, Vox Populi, http://tahrirarchives.com/, accessed February 12, 2021.
13. Alisa Lebow, Filming Revolution, Stanford University, 2018, https://www.filmingrevo
lution.org, accessed February 10, 2021.
14. All Alisa Lebow’s quotes in this paragraph are taken from the text included in the
“History + Memory” link of her i-doc.
15. A similar idea is expressed by the scholar Luke Tredinnick when he reflects on the
transformation of the archive in the digital era: “If history was once inscribed in the
archive before it was inscribed in the historical account, if presence in the archive was
once tantamount to presence in history, then now the archive itself is as much the site
of popular contestation and participation as the histories it generates.” See Luke
Tredinnick, “The Making of History: Remediating Historicised Experience,” in His-
tory in the Digital Age, ed. Tony Weller (London: Routledge, 2012), 56.
16. Tredinnick, “Making of History,” 47.
17. Tredinnick, “Making of History,” 52.
18. Tredinnick, “Making of History,” 57.
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 INDEX

5 Broken Cameras (Burnat and Davidi, Angelos’ Film (Forgács, 1999), 69, 74
2011), 161, 164 Another Land (Goren, 1998), 161,
‘66 Was a Good Year for Tourism (Goren, 163–64
1992), 163–64 Anthology Film Archives, 189, 215
1948 (Bakri, 1999), 180 Antonioni, Michelangelo: Blow-up (1966),
1979 Revolution: Black Friday (video game, 27–28
2016), 223 Antonova, Katherine Pickering, 190
Anzola, Alfredo J.: El misterio de los ojos
Aguirre, Carlos, 22 escarlata (1993), 55, 56–57
Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life), Apsara (Sihanouk, 1966), 144
21–22, 52, 61, 99 Apted, Michael, 256n6
Altalena Affair, 155 Arab Spring, 227
amateur films: concept and characteristics Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), 17–18
of, 47–49; Bossion and, 59–60; Forgács archives and archival sources: archival turn
and, 65, 67, 70, 72–74, 86–87, 98; in Israel: and, 42–44; digitalization of, 222, 226;
A Home Movie (Lilti and Bernstein, 2012), future trends in, 226–29; limitations of,
154; Lewenz and, 55 99–100, 143–44; microhistorical
American Historical Review (journal), 4 documentary and, 6–7, 31–32, 38, 41–49;
American History/American Film microhistory and, 25–27. See also diaries;
(O’Connor and Jackson), 3 family archives; home movies; letters;
“America’s Concentration Camps: personal archives; personal documents;
Remembering the Japanese American photographs
Experience” (1994 exhibition), 97 Arendt, Hannah, 79
Andell, Pia: Y in Vyborg (Hetket jotka jäivät, Arostegui, Julio, 35–36, 39, 70, 240n85
2005), 62 Aurell, Jaume, 35
 278 IND E X

autobiographical approach: family archives Barthes, Roland, 51, 82–83

and, 63–64; in A Family Gathering (Yasui Bartos Family, The (Forgács, 1988), 65, 67, 68,
and Tegnell, 1989), 104, 108–15, 111; in 69, 73, 75
History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991), 104, Bastian, Jeannette, 43
124–26; home movies and, 48, 54, 63; in Bataille, Christophe, 132–33, 142–43
Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas, 1976), 189–90, 191, Baudelaire, Charles, 18
198–201, 209–11, 216, 218; microhistorical Bazin, André, 39, 51, 90, 160
documentary and, 30–31, 32, 33, 34–39, Beker, Elisabeth, 128
104, 222; in The Missing Picture (Panh, Benjamin, Walter, 15, 16–19, 71–72
2013), 132–39, 150; in My Brother (Cohen, Bergland, Betty Ann, 96, 209
2007), 172–73; in For My Children (Aviad, Bergson, Henri, 136
2002), 153, 160–61, 165; in My Land Zion Bernstein, Arik: Israel: A Home Movie (with
(Cohen, 2004), 153, 160–61, 165, 172–73, Lilti, 2012), 49, 58, 153–60, 157–58
177–78, 179–80; in My Terrorist (Cohen, Bibó Reader (Forgács, 2001), 67–68
2002), 153, 160–61, 172–75, 177–78; Binnun, Benya, 157–58, 159, 254n3
postmemory and, 107–8; in Private biography, 83–84, 133
Chronicles: Monologue (Manskij, 1999), Bishop’s Garden, The (Forgács, 2002), 69
60–61; in Reminiscences of a Journey to Blaustein, David: Hacer patria (2007), 33
Lithuania (Mekas, 1972), 195–97; in From Blow-up (Antonioni, 1966), 27–28
a Silk Cocoon (Holsapple, Clay, and Ina, Boelhower, William, 199–200
2005), 104–8, 109; soundtracks and, Booth, Marlene: Yidl in the Middle (1999), 57
63–64; in A World Not Ours (Fleifel, Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy (Panh,
2012), 180–87; in Yidl in the Middle 1996), 46, 127–30, 129, 132, 133
(Booth, 1999), 57 Bossion, Claude: Mémoire d’outremer (1997),
autobiographical studies, 96 58–60
Aviad, Michal, 165; Dimona Twist (2016), Bou, Stéphane, 149
165, 166; The Women Pioneers (2013), Bourgeois Dictionary (Forgács, 1992), 67–68
165–66. See also For My Children (Aviad, Boyle, Deirdre, 131
2002) Brakhage, Stan, 242n21
Avshalom-Dahan, Avigail, 157–58 Brecht, Bertolt, 18
Brewer, John, 15, 16–18, 21, 22, 28
Bad Day at Black Rock (Sturges, 1955), 119, Breznay, József, 74
120–21, 125 Brigante, Louis, 217
Baecque, Antoine de, 3–4 Bryceson, Debora F., 255–56n25
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15, 120, 188, 199, 211 Buil, José: La línea paterna (with Sistach,
Bakó, Elemér, 246n18 1994), 55, 56–57
Bakri, Mohammed: 1948 (1999), 180; Zahra Burke, Peter, 23
(2009), 180 Burnat, Emad: 5 Broken Cameras (with
Balint, Ruth, 67 Davidi, 2011), 161, 164
banality of evil, 79
Banks, Taunya Lovell, 248n5 Cambodian genocide (1975–1979), 127. See
Baron, Jaimie, 53–54 also Panh, Rithy
Barth, Fredrick, 23 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 51, 82–83
 IND E X 279

captions: in Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy Cozarinsky, Edgardo: Carta a un padre

(Panh, 1996), 130; in Class Lot (Forgács, (2013), 33
1997), 90–91, 93; in Free Fall (Forgács, crystal-images, 36, 125, 147–48
1996), 85, 86, 87–88; in History and Cubitt, Geoffrey, 37, 135
Memory (Tajiri, 1991), 120–21, 123; in
Israel: A Home Movie (Lilti and Daily Life in the Abyss (Tachjian), 190
Bernstein, 2012), 154; in The Maelstrom Danton, Robert, 24
(Forgács, 1997), 77, 78, 79–82; in Private Danube Exodus, The (Forgács, 1998), 68,
Chronicles: Monologue (Manskij, 1999), 74, 75
60; in Something Strong Within Davidi, Guy: 5 Broken Cameras (with
(Nakamura and Ishizuka, 1994), 98, Burnat, 2011), 161, 164
159; in A World Not Ours (Fleifel, Davis, Natalie Z., 23, 26, 27–28, 116
2012), 186 Davis, Rocio G., 96–97
Cárcamo, Juan Gracia, 15 De Sica, Vittorio: Umberto D. (1952), 28
Carlsten, Jennie M., 5 Debord, Guy, 15
Carta a un padre (Cozarinsky, 2013), 33 December 7th (Ford and Toland, 1943), 123
Certeau, Michel de, 15, 43, 61, 91, 103, 106 Del Rincón, María, 134
Chalfen, Richard, 47 Deleuze, Gilles, 125, 136, 147–48
Cheese and the Worms, The (Ginzburg), Deren, Maya, 242n21
21–22, 23, 24 Derrida, Jacques, 35, 42, 50
Children of the Camps (Holsapple, 1999), Di Blasio, Tiziana M., 2
105 dialectical images, 17, 18
chronotope, 188, 199–200, 203–5, 210–11, 212, dialogic polyphony, 120
218 diaries (written): microhistorical
Cinema et histoire (Ferro), 2 documentary and, 46, 190–91; in
Civil Liberties Act (1988), 96 Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy (Panh,
Class Lot (Forgács, 1997): communist era in, 1996), 46; in A Letter Without Words
70, 74; home movies in, 83–84, 88–94, (Lewenz, 1998), 57; in Lost, Lost, Lost
92–93; as microhistorical documentary, (Mekas, 1976), 189, 190, 209; in From a Silk
69; newsreels in, 45, 84 Cocoon (Holsapple, Clay, and Ina, 2005),
Clay, Emery, III: From a Silk Cocoon (with 46, 105–8; in Something Strong Within
Holsapple and Ina, 2005), 46, 97, 104–8, (Nakamura and Ishizuka, 1994), 46,
105, 109 98–99; in The Women Pioneers (Aviad,
Cocker, Emma, 44–45 2013), 165–66
Cohen, Yulie, 165; My Brother (2007), 165, diary films: concept and characteristics of,
172–73; My Terrorist (2002), 153, 160–61, 162, 188, 190–91, 192–93; Mekas and,
165, 172–75, 177–78. See also My Land Zion 189–94, 214, 215–16; Perlov and, 46, 161,
(Cohen, 2004) 162, 188
collective portraits, 58–61, 67, 68, 224–25 Diary of Mr. N, The (Forgács, 1990), 68
Come See the Paradise (Parker, 1990), Didi-Huberman, George, 42–43, 53
122–23 digital age, 222, 226–29
Cook, Terry, 42, 114 Dimona Twist (Aviad, 2016), 165, 166
counter-history, 121 dioramas, 135–37, 143, 145–51, 146–47
 280 IND EX

Dittmar, Linda, 161, 165 family archives: autobiographical approach

documentary film: archival sources and, and, 63; in collective portraits or family
43–44; history and, 1–2, 5–6. See also histories, 58–64; future trends in, 226–28;
microhistorical documentary history from below and, 49–53; human
domestic ethnography, 66, 67, 68, 180 agency and, 52; limitations of, 221–22;
Drift, Marcel van der: Hidden like Anne microhistorical documentary and, 31–32,
Frank (with Prins and Steenhuis, 2010), 45–53; postmemory and, 38. See also
224–25 diaries; family photographs; home
Dusi & Jenő (Forgács, 1988), 68, 69, 73 movies; letters; personal documents
family chronicle films, 48
Eakin, Paul John, 55, 191 Family Gathering, A (Yasui and Tegnell,
Echeverría, Carlos: Juan, como si nada 1989): autobiographical approach of, 97,
hubiera sucedido (1987), 33 104; home movies in, 109, 110–15; letters
educational video games, 223–24 and personal documents in, 110; music
Egan, Susana, 193 in, 111–12; postmemory in, 108–9, 113–15;
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 79 voice-over narration in, 56, 111, 111,
elimination, L’ (Panh), 132–33 112–13, 113
Emshwiller, Ed, 217–18 family photographs (snapshots):
essay films: Forgács and, 67–68; History and autobiographical approach and, 63;
Memory (Tajiri, 1991) as, 97, 115, 119, 121, digitalization of, 226–27; in Dimona
133–35; microhistory and, 28, 32; Twist (Aviad, 2016), 166; in A Family
postmodern approach in, 3–4 Gathering (Yasui and Tegnell, 1989), 110;
everyday life and practices: in Class Lot future trends in, 226–27; in History and
(Forgács, 1997), 84, 91–92; family archives Memory (Tajiri, 1991), 116; in Hunky
and, 52; in Free Fall (Forgács, 1996), 84; in Blues (Forgács, 2009), 72–73; in
Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas, 1976), 202, 216; in microhistorical documentaries, 32,
The Maelstrom (Forgács, 1997), 77–79; in 46–47, 49–53, 56; in The Missing Picture
Mémoire d’outremer (Bossion, 1997), (Panh, 2013), 137; as mnemonic objects,
59–60; in For My Children (Aviad, 2002), 38, 107–8; in From a Silk Cocoon
171; in Perlov’s diary films, 162; in Private (Holsapple, Clay, and Ina, 2005),
Chronicles: Monologue (Manskij, 1999), 107–8
60–61; as resistance, 61, 91, 103–4; in S-21: family portraits, 37
The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (Panh, Far from Poland (Godmilow, 1984), 6
2003), 130–31; in Something Strong Within Farag, Kobi: Private Album (2018),
(Nakamura and Ishizuka, 1994), 100–104; 253–54n2
in A World Not Ours (Fleifel, 2012), Feng, Peter X., 112, 115, 125, 250n32
181–83, 182, 185–87 Ferro, Marc, 2, 123
everyday life studies, 14–20, 72 fiction films: microhistorical documentary
Exile Family Movie (Riahi, 2013), 183 and, 45; in History and Memory (Tajiri,
exilic filmmaking, 183, 194 1991), 45, 119, 120–23, 125; in The Missing
expository documentaries, 6, 29–30, 128–29, Picture (Panh, 2013), 45, 144
138 Film and History (journal), 2
Eyal, Tzfira, 159 Film Culture (magazine), 189, 208–9, 215
 IND EX 28 1

film diaries: concept and characteristics of, 74; Hunky Blues (2009), 68, 72–73; I Am
46, 188, 190–91, 192; Mekas and, 190–94, Von Höfler (2008), 68, 69, 73, 75, 247n35;
198, 201–2, 215–16, 218, 219–20 Kádár’s Kiss (1997), 67– 68, 70, 74; Land of
Film in History, The (Sorlin), 2, 3 Nothing (1996), 74; Meanwhile
Filming Revolution (Lebow, 2018), 228–29 Somewhere . . . 1940–1943 (1994), 68, 74;
Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, 189, 215 Miss Universe 1929 (2006), 68, 69, 75,
Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 189, 215, 217 247n35; The Notebook of a Lady (1994),
Flaherty, Robert J.: Nanook of the North 68, 73; El Perro Negro (2005), 1, 6, 56, 68,
(1927), 29 73; Picturesque Epochs (2016), 68, 69, 74;
Fleifel, Mahdi. See World Not Ours, A Simply Happy (1993), 68; Venom (2016),
(Fleifel, 2012) 67– 68; Wittgenstein Tractatus (1992),
Fluxus movement, 217 67– 68. See also Class Lot (Forgács, 1997);
Folman, Ari: Waltz with Bashir (2008), 145, Maelstrom, The (Forgács, 1997)
147, 152–53 Foucault, Michel, 42, 43, 121
For My Children (Aviad, 2002): Frank, Robert, 208–9
autobiographical approach of, 153, Free Fall (Forgács, 1996): captions and
160–61; home movies in, 49, 167, 168, intertitles in, 85, 86, 87–88; Holocaust in, 74,
170–71, 172; interviews in, 168, 170; 75; home movies in, 83–89, 89; interviews in,
macrohistorical dimension in, 168; My 69; macrohistorical dimension in, 84–87;
Land Zion (Cohen, 2004) and, 176, 178; voice-over narration in, 85, 87
newsreels in, 170; oral testimonies in, 170; Frisby, David, 17
voice-over narration in, 170 Frisch, Michel, 33
Ford, John: December 7th (with Toland, From a Silk Cocoon (Holsapple, Clay, and
1943), 123 Ina, 2005), 46, 97, 104–8, 105, 109
Forgács, Péter: amateur films and, 65, 67, 70, From Caligari to Hitler (Kracauer), 2
72–74, 86–87, 98; as archaeologist, 44, 72, From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann, 1953),
84; everyday life and practices and, 16; 123, 124
microhistorical documentary and, 1–2;
From a Silk Cocoon (Holsapple, Clay, and Gaines, Jane, 1
Ina, 2005) and, 106; Something Strong Gánóczy, Mária, 74
Within (Nakamura and Ishizuka, 1994) Geertz, Clifford, 22, 25
and, 98; as twentieth-century historian, GermanUnity@Balaton (Forgács, 2011), 68,
69–75; typology of films by, 67–69; use of 70, 74
home movies by, 65–67, 69–74 Gertel, Moshe, 175
Forgács, Péter—films: Angelos’ Film (1999), Gianikian, Yervant, 44–45
69, 74; The Bartos Family (1988), 65, 67, Giard, Luce, 103
68, 69, 73, 75; Bibó Reader (2001), 67– 68; Ginzburg, Carlo: Benjamin and, 18; on
The Bishop’s Garden (2002), 69; Bourgeois Davis, 26, 116; Didi-Huberman on, 43; on
Dictionary (1992), 67– 68; The Danube evidential paradigm, 18, 26, 31–32, 53, 99;
Exodus (1998), 68, 74, 75; The Diary of Forgács’s films and, 76; Highmore on, 17;
Mr. N (1990), 68; Dusi & Jenő (1988), 68, on Italian neo-realist cinema, 28; on
69, 73; Free Fall (1996), 69, 74, 75, 83–89, Kracauer, 20; microstoria school and,
89; GermanUnity@Balaton (2011), 68, 70, 21–22, 23–27, 128, 138, 144
 282IND EX

Godard, Jean-Luc: Histoire(s) du cinéma History, the Last Things Before the Last
(1988), 3–4, 120 (Kracauer), 20
Godmilow, Jill: Far from Poland (1984), 6 History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991): auteurial
Golani, Motti, 176–79, 177 nature of, 97, 115–16; autobiographical
Goren, Amit: ‘66 Was a Good Year for approach of, 104, 124–26; fiction films in,
Tourism (1992), 163–64; Another Land 45, 119, 120–23, 125; home movies in,
(1998), 161, 163–64 116–17; openly reflexive strategy in, 124;
Goursat, Juliette, 37–38 personal documents in, 46; postmemory
Gregory, Brad S., 21 in, 116–19, 118, 124–26; postmodern
Grendi, Edoardo, 23 approach of, 6, 34, 119–24, 122; wooden
Guasch, Anna, 43 bird in, 47, 116, 117
Guerin, Frances, 137 history from below: concept of, 21, 22;
family archives and, 49–53; Forgács and,
Hacer patria (Blaustein, 2007), 33 69; i-docs and, 228; Mekas and, 189–90;
Hallas, Robert, 137 microhistorical documentary and, 28–29;
Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi (Avi Mograbi, oral history and, 33; Something Strong
1999), 152–53 Within (Nakamura and Ishizuka, 1994)
Harootunian, Harry D., 16–17, 18, 19 and, 99. See also microhistory and
Hawai Mare Okino Senjo Eigwa (Yamamoto, microstoria school
1942), 123 History Goes to the Movies (Hughes-
Henke, Suzette A., 259n37 Warrington), 5
Hernández-Navarro, Miguel Ángel, 71–72 History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke), 21–22
Hidden like Anne Frank (Prins, Steenhuis, history of the present, 38–39, 70, 104, 110,
and van der Drift, 2010), 224–25 207, 229
Highmore, Ben, 15–17, 18, 59, 60, 91 History on Film/Film on History
Him Houy, 130 (Rosenstone), 1, 2–5
Hirsch, Marianne, 38, 63–64, 107–8 Holocaust, 42–43, 178–79, 184, 224–25. See
Hirsch, Storm de, 217 also Free Fall (Forgács, 1996); Maelstrom,
Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard, 1988), 3–4, 120 The (Forgács, 1997)
Historian and Film, The (Smith), 2 Holsapple, Stephen: Children of the Camps
historical films, 3–4 (1999), 105; From a Silk Cocoon (with Clay
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and and Ina, 2005), 46, 97, 104–8, 105, 109
Television (journal), 2 home movies: vs. amateur films, 47–49;
historical television documentaries, 29 appropriation practices for, 54–57, 66,
histories of the self, 249n15 100–101; autobiographical approach and,
Histories of the Self (Summerfield), 190 48, 54, 63; in Class Lot (Forgács, 1997),
historiophoty, 5 83–84, 88–94, 92–93; in collective
history: film and, 1–6; memory and, 35–38. portraits or family histories, 58–64; in A
See also history from below; history of the Family Gathering (Yasui and Tegnell,
present 1989), 109, 110–15; in Free Fall (Forgács,
History (formerly History Channel), 29 1996), 83–89, 89; future trends in, 227; in
History, Historians, and Autobiography History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991), 116–17;
(Popkin), 34–35 in Israel: A Home Movie (Lilti and
 IND E X 28 3

Bernstein, 2012), 58, 153–60, 157–58; in Images in Spite of All (Didi-Huberman),

Jerusalem, We Are Here (Naaman, 2016), 42–43, 53
225–26; in Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas, 1976), Ina, Satsuki, 112; From a Silk Cocoon (with
202–4, 209, 214, 216–17, 218; in The Holsapple and Clay, 2005), 46, 97, 104–8,
Maelstrom (Forgács, 1997), 56, 75, 76–83, 105, 109
78, 81; in Mémoire d’outremer (Bossion, Inheriting Power (Levi), 21–22, 25
1997), 58–60; microhistorical interactive documentaries (i-docs), 223–24,
documentary and, 31–32, 46, 47–57; as 228
mnemonic objects, 38, 47, 70, 72, 112–15; in International Association for Media and
For My Children (Aviad, 2002), 49, 167, History, 2
168, 170–71, 172; in El Perro Negro intertitles: in Free Fall (Forgács, 1996), 86; in
(Forgács, 2005), 56; in Private Century Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas, 1976), 200–201,
(Soukromé století) (Kikl, 2006), 62; in 202–3, 204, 206, 208, 217, 218; in
Private Chronicles: Monologue (Manskij, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
1999), 60–61; in Something Strong Within (Mekas, 1972), 196–97
(Nakamura and Ishizuka, 1994), 49, 56, interviews: in 1948 (Bakri, 1999), 180; in The
58, 97–103, 102, 106, 158–59, 202; in A Bartos Family (Forgács, 1988), 69; in
World Not Ours (Fleifel, 2012), 49, 182, Class Lot (Forgács, 1997), 90; in Dimona
184–87, 185; in Y in Vyborg (Hetket jotka Twist (Aviad, 2016), 166; in Duch: Master
jäivät) (Andell, 2005), 62; in Yidl in the of the Forges of Hell (Panh, 2011), 131–32;
Middle (Booth, 1999), 57. See also Forgács, in Dusi & Jenő (Forgács, 1988), 69; in A
Péter Family Gathering (Yasui and Tegnell,
Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, 5 1989), 110; in Filming Revolution (Lebow,
human agency: concept of, 25; in 2018), 228; in Free Fall (Forgács, 1996), 69;
educational video games, 223; family in Hidden like Anne Frank (Prins et al.,
archives and, 52, 64; in Israel: A Home 2010), 225; home movies and, 56; in
Movie (Lilti and Bernstein, 2012), 158; in Hunky Blues (Forgács, 2009), 72–73; in I
Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas, 1976), 201; in The Am Von Höfler (Forgács, 2008), 69; in
Maelstrom (Forgács, 1997), 76; The Maelstrom (Forgács, 1997), 80; in
microhistorical documentary and, 31, 221; Mémoire d’outremer (Bossion, 1997), 59;
in The Missing Picture (Panh, 2013), 133; in microhistorical documentary and, 33; in
My Terrorist (Cohen, 2002), 174; in Miss Universe 1929 (Forgács, 2006), 69; in
Something Strong Within (Nakamura and The Missing Picture (Panh, 2013), 136,
Ishizuka, 1994), 100; in A World Not Ours 148–49; in For My Children (Aviad, 2002),
(Fleifel, 2012), 181 168, 170; in My Land Zion (Cohen, 2004),
Hunky Blues (Forgács, 2009), 68, 72–73 175, 176–77; in My Terrorist (Cohen,
2002), 173; in Picturesque Epochs
I Am Von Höfler (Forgács, 2008), 68, 69, 73, (Forgács, 2016), 69; in Private Album
75, 247n35 (Farag, 2018), 253–54n2; in Waltz with
I for India (Suri, 2005), 183 Bashir (Folman, 2008), 152–53; in Zahra
I Had Nowhere to Go (Mekas), 203 (Bakri, 2009), 180
i-docs (interactive documentaries), 223–26, intrahistoria, 22
228 irony, 142–43
 284IND E X

Ishizuka, Karen L., 248n1. See also King, Rodney, 227

Something Strong Within (Nakamura and Klimowski, Roni, 157–58
Ishizuka, 1994) Konczak, Julian: A Polish Journey (2016),
Israel: A Home Movie (Lilti and Bernstein, 223–24
2012), 49, 58, 153–60, 157–58 Kracauer, Siegfried, 2, 16–17, 19–20, 27
Israeli documentaries: diary films and, Kubelka, Peter, 195
161–62; Israel: A Home Movie (Lilti and Kuchiyama, Yuri N., 97–98
Bernstein, 2012), 49, 58, 153–60, 157–58; Kumamoto, Junji, 101
journal entry approach and, 162–64; as Kuramoto, Dan, 98
microhistorical documentaries, 152–54.
See also Aviad, Michal; Cohen, Yulie Land of Nothing (Forgács, 1996), 74
Italian neo-realist cinema, 28 Landsberg, Alison, 249n26
Lane, Jim, 37, 161
Jackson, Martin A., 3 Langford, Rachael, 59
Jacobs, Florence, 215, 217–18 Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah (1985), 42–43
Jacobs, Ken, 195, 200, 215, 217–18 Le Roy, Emmanuel, 23
James, David E., 192, 194, 214 Lebow, Alisa, 37, 110; Filming Revolution
Japanese American internment: history and (2018), 228–29
documentaries on, 95–97, 104; From a Silk Lefebvre, Henri, 15
Cocoon (Holsapple, Clay, and Ina, 2005) Lejeune, Philippe, 161–62, 194
and, 46, 97, 104–8, 105, 109. See also Lennon, John, 215
Family Gathering, A (Yasui and Tegnell, Lepore, Jill, 83–84, 133
1989); History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991); Letter Without Words, A (Lewenz, 1998), 55,
Something Strong Within (Nakamura and 56–57
Ishizuka, 1994) letters: microhistorical documentary and,
Japanese American National Museum (Los 46; in Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy
Angeles, California), 97 (Panh, 1996), 46, 128–29; in A Family
Jerusalem, We Are Here (Naaman, 2016), 225 Gathering (Yasui and Tegnell, 1989), 110;
Jeux d’echelles (Revel), 22, 27–28, 37 in A Letter Without Words (Lewenz, 1998),
joie de vivre, La (Sihanouk, 1969), 144 57; in Mémoire d’outremer (Bossion, 1997),
journal entry approach, 161–64, 188 59; in From a Silk Cocoon (Holsapple,
Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido Clay, and Ina, 2005), 46, 105–8; in
(Echeverría, 1987), 33 Something Strong Within (Nakamura and
Ishizuka, 1994), 46; in Y in Vyborg (Hetket
Kádár’s Kiss (Forgács, 1997), 67–68, 70, 74 jotka jäivät) (Andell, 2005), 62
kairos, 36, 125, 135–36 Levi, Giovanni, 21–22, 23–27, 32
Kairys, Stepas, 206 Lewenz, Lisa: A Letter Without Words
Karos, Bandi, 87–88 (1998), 55, 56–57
Katzir, Dan: Out of Love . . . Be Back Shortly Lilti, Eliav: Israel: A Home Movie (with
(1997), 161, 162–63 Bernstein, 2012), 49, 58, 153–60, 157–58
Kikl, Jan: Private Century (Soukromé století, línea paterna, La (Buil and Sistach, 1994), 55,
2006), 62 56–57
 IND EX 28 5

Lipsitz, George, 96 in, 77–79; Free Fall (Forgács, 1996) and,

Lithuania, 188–89. See also Mekas, Jonas 84–85, 88; home movies in, 56, 75, 76–83,
Loshitzky, Yosefa, 179 78, 81; human agency in, 76; impact of, 1,
Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas, 1976): 74; interviews in, 80; macrohistorical
autobiographical approach of, 189–90, 191, dimension in, 76–77, 79–81; as
198–201; conclusion of, 218–19; as microhistorical documentary, 69, 75–76;
experimental or documentary cinema, music in, 75, 80, 88; photographs in, 75;
191–92; immigrant experience in, 201–7, voice-over narration in, 77, 80
205–6, 219–20; integration into American Magnússon, Sigurður G., 22, 76
society in, 201, 207–11, 219–20; as Manskij, Vitaly: Private Chronicles:
microhistorical documentary, 188, Monologue (1999), 58–59, 60–61
189–90; New York art and film Marker, Chris, 28
community in, 211–20, 213, 217; Markopoulos, George, 217–18
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania Mass Ornament, The (Kracauer), 19
(Mekas) and, 196–98; structure of, Matuszewski, Bołeslaw, 2
200–201 Maus (Spiegelman), 147
Lüdtke, Alf, 21–22, 52, 58, 61, 99, 226 McElwee, Ross: Sherman’s March (1986), 163
Lukàcs, Georg, 15 McGarry, Fearghal, 5
Meanwhile Somewhere . . . 1940–1943
M (Prividera, 2007), 33 (Forgács, 1994), 68, 74
MacDonald, Scott, 219 Medick, Hans, 22
Maciunas, George, 217 Medina, Celso, 22
macrohistorical dimension: in Class Lot Medina, José, 121
(Forgács, 1997), 89, 90–91; family archives Mekas, Adolfas, 189, 195, 200, 208
and, 63; in Free Fall (Forgács, 1996), Mekas, Jonas: everyday life and practices
84–87; home movies and, 56; in and, 16; film diaries and diary films by,
interactive documentaries, 223–26; in 46, 189–94, 198, 201–2, 214, 215–16, 218,
Israel: A Home Movie (Lilti and 219–20; life of, 188–89
Bernstein, 2012), 159–60; Kracauer on, 20; Mekas, Jonas—films: Reminiscences of a
in Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas, 1976), 205–7; in Journey to Lithuania (1972), 188, 189,
The Maelstrom (Forgács, 1997), 76–77, 194–98, 197, 214; Walden (1969), 189, 198,
79–81; in Mémoire d’outremer (Bossion, 214. See also Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas,
1997), 59; in The Missing Picture (Panh, 1976)
2013), 137–43; in For My Children (Aviad, Mémoire d’outremer (Bossion, 1997), 58–60
2002), 166–67, 168; in My Land Zion memory: crystal-images and, 36, 125,
(Cohen, 2004), 175, 176–77, 177, 178–79; in 147–48; history and, 35–38; as personal vs.
Perlov’s diary films, 162; in A World Not collective, 36–38. See also mnemonic
Ours (Fleifel, 2012), 181–82, 186; in Zahra objects; postmemory
(Bakri, 2009), 180 memory films, 134–37
Madoff, Marlene, 42 memory-images, 136
Maelstrom, The (Forgács, 1997): captions in, Merewether, Charles, 43
77, 78, 79–82; everyday life and practices Michelson, Annette, 195
 286 IND EX

microhistorical documentary: concept and Montgomery, Michael V., 199

characteristics of, 1–2, 6–7, 14, 27–34, Moran, James M., 47
39–40, 221; archival sources and, 6–7, mug shots, 129–30, 129, 132, 137, 144
31–32, 38, 41–49; autobiographical Munk, Yael, 165
approach and, 30–31, 32, 33, 34–39, 104, music and soundtracks: archival sources
222; everyday life studies and, 14–20, 72; and, 44; autobiographical approach and,
future trends in, 222–26; human agency 63–64; in Class Lot (Forgács, 1997), 90,
in, 221; postmodernism and, 33–34. See 91–93; in A Family Gathering (Yasui and
also home movies; specific documentaries Tegnell, 1989), 111–12; in Forgács’s films,
microhistory and microstoria school, 21–27, 71; in Israel: A Home Movie (Lilti and
128, 133, 138, 144. See also Ginzburg, Carlo; Bernstein, 2012), 154; in Lost, Lost, Lost
Levi, Giovanni (Mekas, 1976), 201, 203, 204, 215; in The
Mihyi, Fahad, 173, 174 Maelstrom (Forgács, 1997), 75, 80, 88; in
Mimura, Glen M., 118 Mémoire d’outremer (Bossion, 1997), 59; in
Mining the Home Movie (Zimmermann), microhistorical documentary, 32; in The
49–50 Missing Picture (Panh, 2013), 139, 141–42,
Miss Universe 1929 (Forgács, 2006), 68, 69, 148; in From a Silk Cocoon (Holsapple,
75, 247n35 Clay, and Ina, 2005), 106; in Something
Missing Picture, The (Panh, 2013): absence of Strong Within (Nakamura and Ishizuka,
images of the genocide and, 149–51; 1994), 98, 100; in A World Not Ours
archival sources in, 133, 146–47; (Fleifel, 2012), 183, 186
autobiographical approach of, 132–39, 150; My Brother (Cohen, 2007), 165, 172–73
dioramas in, 135–37, 143, 145–51, 146–47; My Land Zion (Cohen, 2004):
fiction films in, 45, 144; macrohistorical autobiographical approach of, 153, 160–61,
dimension in, 137–43; as memory film, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 179–80; interviews in,
134–37; as microhistorical documentary, 176–77; Jerusalem, We Are Here (Naaman,
127; music in, 139, 141–42, 148; newsreels 2016) and, 226; macrohistorical
and propaganda films in, 45, 138–49; dimension in, 176–77, 177, 178–79;
voice-over narration in, 133, 134–35, voice-over narration in, 178; A World Not
139–43, 144, 145, 146–48 Ours (Fleifel, 2012) and, 187
misterio de los ojos escarlata, El (Anzola, My Terrorist (Cohen, 2002), 153, 160–61, 165,
1993), 55, 56–57 172–75, 177–78
mnemonic objects: archival materials as,
187; in A Family Gathering (Yasui and Naaman, Dorit: Jerusalem, We Are Here
Tegnell, 1989), 112; family photographs as, (2016), 225
38, 107–8; in History and Memory (Tajiri, Naficy, Hamid, 183, 194, 199
1991), 47, 116, 117–18; home movies as, 38, Nakamura, Robert. See Something Strong
47, 70, 72, 112–15; in The Missing Picture Within (Nakamura and Ishizuka, 1994)
(Panh, 2013), 137; in From a Silk Cocoon Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1927), 29
(Holsapple, Clay, and Ina, 2005), 107–8 narrative identity, 191
Mograbi, Avi: Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi narrative recovery, 209
(1999), 152–53 New American Cinema movement, 215
Montaillou (Le Roy), 23 New Historians, 169
 IND E X 287

New Perspectives on Historical Writing 127, 131–32, 145; Exile (2016), 127; Graves
(Burke), 23 Without a Name (2018), 127; S-21: The
newsreels: microhistorical documentary Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), 127,
and, 45; in Class Lot (Forgács, 1997), 45, 84, 130–31, 132, 145. See also Missing Picture,
90–94; in A Family Gathering (Yasui and The (Panh, 2013)
Tegnell, 1989), 110; in Free Fall (Forgács, Papanastassiou, Angelos, 69
1996), 84; in History and Memory (Tajiri, Parker, Alan: Come See the Paradise (1990),
1991), 116, 121, 122, 123–24; in The Missing 122–23
Picture (Panh, 2013), 45, 138–49; in For My Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), 17–18
Children (Aviad, 2002), 170 Peereboom family. See Maelstrom, The
Nichols, Bill, 6, 29, 71 (Forgács, 1997)
Nitsch, Hermann, 195 performativity, 32, 51, 113, 118, 129, 131, 134–37
Noordegraaf, Julia J., 53 Perlov, David, 46, 161, 188; Diary (1973–1983),
Notebook of a Lady, The (Forgács, 1994), 68, 73 162; Updated Diary (1990–1999), 162
Perro Negro, El (Forgács, 2005), 1, 6, 56, 68, 73
O’Connor, John E., 3 personal archives, 45–46. See also diaries;
Odin, Roger, 49–50, 56, 67, 114 family archives; letters
Omori, Emiko and Chizu: Rabbit in the personal documents: in Duch: Master of the
Moon (1999), 104 Forges of Hell (Panh, 2011), 132; in A Family
On Photography (Sontag), 51 Gathering (Yasui and Tegnell, 1989), 110; in
Ono, Yoko, 215 History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991), 46; in
oral history: concept of, 5, 33; A Family From a Silk Cocoon (Holsapple, Clay, and
Gathering (Yasui and Tegnell, 1989) and, Ina, 2005), 46, 105–8; in A World Not Ours
110; in Hidden like Anne Frank (Prins (Fleifel, 2012), 46
et al., 2010), 225; in History and Memory Pető, György. See Class Lot (Forgács, 1997);
(Tajiri, 1991), 116; in Israel: A Home Movie Free Fall (Forgács, 1996)
(Lilti and Bernstein, 2012), 160; in For My Philibert, Nicolas: To Be and to Have (Etre et
Children (Aviad, 2002), 170; in S-21: The avoir, 2002), 29
Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (Panh, photographs: Barthes on, 82–83; in Bophana:
2003), 130, 131. See also interviews A Cambodian Tragedy (Panh, 1996),
Ordinary Marriage, An (Antonova), 190 129–30, 129; in Class Lot (Forgács, 1997),
Osendarp, Tinus, 77 90; in Dimona Twist (Aviad, 2016), 166; in
Out of Love . . . Be Back Shortly (Katzir, Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell (Panh,
1997), 161, 162–63 2011), 132; in Jerusalem, We Are Here
(Naaman, 2016), 225; in The Maelstrom
Paisá (Rossellini, 1946), 28 (Forgács, 1997), 75; in The Missing Picture
Pakštas, Kazys, 206 (Panh, 2013), 137, 139–40, 144–45, 146–48,
Palestinian documentaries, 152–53, 161, 164, 146; in Private Album (Farag, 2018),
180. See also World Not Ours, A (Fleifel, 253–54n2; in Private Chronicles:
2012) Monologue (Manskij, 1999), 60; in S-21:
Panh, Rithy: Bophana: A Cambodian The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (Panh,
Tragedy (1996), 46, 127–30, 129, 132, 133; 2003), 130; in The Women Pioneers (Aviad,
Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell (2011), 2013), 165–66. See also mug shots
 288 IND E X

Picturesque Epochs (Forgács, 2016), 68, Quaderni storici (journal), 23

69, 74
Plato, 35 Rabbit in the Moon (Emiko and Chizu
Polish Journey, A (Konczack, 2016), 223–24 Omori, 1999), 104
Polland, Lisa, 169 Rátz, László, 74
Poni, Carlo, 23, 25, 76, 128 reenactments, 132. See also dioramas
Pons, Anacleto, 22, 27 Reminiscences of a Journey to
Popkin, Jeremy D., 34–35 Lithuania (Mekas, 1972), 188, 189,
postmemory: concept of, 64, 107–8; family 194–98, 197, 214
archives and, 38; in A Family Gathering Renov, Michael, 66, 75–76, 180
(Yasui and Tegnell, 1989), 108–9, 113–15; in Return of Martin Guerre, The (Davis), 26
History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991), 116–19, Revel, Jacques, 19, 22, 24, 27–28, 37, 67
118, 124–26; trauma and, 38, 64, 107–8, 112 revisionist history, 169
postmodernism: autobiography and, 35; A Riahi, Arash T.: Exile Family Movie (2013),
Family Gathering (Yasui and Tegnell, 183
1989) and, 114–15; Forgács’s films and, 71; Ricci Lucchi, Angela, 44–45
historiographical approach of, 3–4; Ricoeur, Paul, 19, 24, 35
History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991) and, 34, Rosen, Philip, 44
119–24, 122; microhistorical documentary Rosen, Robert, 101
and, 33–34, 222; microhistory and, 26–27 Rosengarten, Ruth, 43
Pouw, Elvira, 53 Rosenstone, Robert: on film and history,
Prins, Marcel: Hidden like Anne Frank (with 2–5; on Forgács’s films, 1; on
Steenhuis and van der Drift, 2010), 224–25 historiography, 6, 34, 71, 120, 123, 190
Private Album (Farag, 2018), 253–54n2 Rossellini, Roberto: Paisá (1946), 28
Private Century (Soukromé století) (Kikl, Rouf, Jeffrey, 216
2006), 62 Rousset, Jean, 192
Private Chronicles: Monologue (Manskij, Rousso, Henry, 39, 70, 240n85
1999), 58–59, 60–61 Russell, Catherine, 44
private history, 66
Private Hungary series (Forgács), 65–66, S-21 (Security Prison-21), 128, 129–32, 139
73, 74 Salaried Masses, The (Kracauer), 19
Private Photo & Film Archives, 65 Salvans family. See Perro Negro, El (Forgács,
Prividera, Nicolás: M (2007), 33 2005)
propaganda films: microhistorical Sánchez-Biosca, Vicente, 42, 129, 147
documentary and, 45; in Duch: Master of Schwartz, Tania, 157–58
the Forges of Hell (Panh, 2011), 132; in The Serna, Justo, 22, 27
Missing Picture (Panh, 2013), 45, 138–49; Shand, Ryan, 47, 48
in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine Sherman’s March (McElwee, 1986), 163
(Panh, 2003), 130 Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), 42–43
prosthetic memory, 249n26 Sihanouk, Norodom: Apsara (1966), 144; La
proximate collaborative autobiography, 55 joie de vivre (1969), 144
public archives, 45. See also family archives; Simmel, Georg, 16–17
newsreels; propaganda films Simply Happy (Forgács, 1993), 68
 INDEX289

Sipe, Dan, 33 Tanaka, Janice, 112; Who’s Going to Pay for

Sistach, Marisa: La línea paterna (with Buil, These Donuts, Anyway? (1992), 104
1994), 55, 56–57 Tatsuno, David, 99, 116–17
Sitney, P. Adam, 217, 217 Tegnell, Ann. See Family Gathering, A
Situationist International, 15 (Yasui and Tegnell, 1989)
Slaves on Screen (Davis), 28 temporal indiscernibility, 134–36, 148–49,
Slávik, Andrej, 28 150–51
Slootweg, Tom, 47, 48 Tepperman, Charles, 48
smartphones, 227–28 Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’
Smith, Paul, 2 Autobiographies (Aurell), 35
snapshots. See family photographs Theory of Film (Kracauer), 19–20
(snapshots) Thompson, Edward P., 22
Sobchack, Vivian, 199 Time Passages (Lipsitz), 96
Something Strong Within (Nakamura and To Be and to Have (Etre et avoir) (Philibert,
Ishizuka, 1994): everyday life and 2002), 29
practices in, 100–104; home movies in, Toland, Gregg: December 7th (with Ford,
49, 56, 58, 97–103, 102, 106, 158–59, 202; 1943), 123
letters and diaries in, 46, 98–99 Tonooka, Sumi, 112
Sontag, Susan, 51 Toplin, Robert B., 3–4
Sorlin, Pierre, 2, 3 Torchin, Leshu, 131
soundtracks. See music and soundtracks Torregrosa, Marta, 134
Spiegelman, Art, 147 Tracy, Spencer, 119
Stam, Robert, 258n28 transnational family, 183–84
Steedman, Carolyn, 52–53 trauma and traumatic memories: concept of
Steenhuis, Peter Henk: Hidden like Anne postmemory and, 64, 107–8; family
Frank (with Prins and van der Drift, archives and, 38; in A Family Gathering
2010), 224–25 (Yasui and Tegnell, 1989), 108–9, 113–15; in
Stephan, Ranwa, 225–26 History and Memory (Tajiri, 1991), 116–19,
Stoler, Ann Laura, 42 118, 124–26; in The Missing Picture (Panh,
Sturges, John: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), 2013), 135, 137, 150
119, 120–21, 125 trauma films, 124
Sturken, Marita, 125 Treacey, Mia E. M., 2
subjectivity, 134–36 Tredinnick, Luke, 229
Summerfield, Penny, 190, 249n15 Turim, Maureen, 193–95
Suri, Sandhya: I for India (2005), 183 Tysliava, Juozas, 206
surrealism, 15, 16, 18
Swender, Rebecca, 54–55 Umberto D. (De Sica, 1952), 28
Szemző, Tibor, 71, 75, 80, 88, 90, 92–93 Unamuno, Miguel de, 22
Szíjártó, István, 22, 24–25, 76 Up series (Apted), 256n6

Tachjian, Vahé, 190 Van Buren, Cassandra, 112

Tajiri, Rea, 16, 112. See also History and Vann Nath, 130
Memory (Tajiri, 1991) Varga, Balázs, 67
 29 0 IND E X

Venom (Forgács, 2016), 67–68 Walker, Janet, 124

video games, 223–24 Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008), 145, 147,
virtual reality (VR), 222–23 152–53
voice-over narration: in Another Land Warhol, Andy, 215
(Goren, 1998), 163; archival sources and, What Is Microhistory? (Magnússon and
44; in Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy Szíjártó), 22
(Panh, 1996), 128–29; in diary films, 161; When the War Was Over (Beker), 128
family archives and, 63; in A Family White, Hayden, 5, 26–27, 138
Gathering (Yasui and Tegnell, 1989), 56, Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts,
111, 111, 112–13; in Free Fall (Forgács, 1996), Anyway? (Tanaka, 1992), 104
85, 87; in History and Memory (Tajiri, Wittgenstein Tractatus (Forgács, 1992),
1991), 117–18, 119, 122–23, 125; home movies 67–68
and, 56; in Israel: A Home Movie (Lilti Women Pioneers, The (Aviad, 2013), 165–66
and Bernstein, 2012), 155, 156, 254n3; in Woodham, Anna, 46–47
Jerusalem, We Are Here (Naaman, 2016), “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
226; in Lost, Lost, Lost (Mekas, 1976), 189, Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 18–19
200, 201–2, 204–8, 209–11, 212–13, 218–19; World Not Ours, A (Fleifel, 2012):
in The Maelstrom (Forgács, 1997), 77, 80; autobiographical approach of, 160–61,
microhistorical documentary and, 32; in 180–87; home movies in, 49, 182, 184–87,
The Missing Picture (Panh, 2013), 133, 185; human agency in, 181; Jerusalem, We
134–35, 139–43, 144, 145, 146–48, 150; in For Are Here (Naaman, 2016) and, 226;
My Children (Aviad, 2002), 170; in My macrohistorical dimension in, 181–82,
Land Zion (Cohen, 2004), 175–76, 178; in 186; as microhistorical documentary, 153;
My Terrorist (Cohen, 2002), 174; in personal documents in, 46
Perlov’s diary films, 162; in Private
Century (Soukromé století) (Kikl, 2006), Xing, Jun, 96
62; in Private Chronicles: Monologue
(Manskij, 1999), 60; in Reminiscences of a Y in Vyborg (Hetket jotka jäivät) (Andell,
Journey to Lithuania (Mekas, 1972), 2005), 62
195–97; in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Yamamoto, Kajiro: Hawai Mare Okino Senjo
Machine (Panh, 2003), 130; in From a Silk Eigwa (1942), 123
Cocoon (Holsapple, Clay, and Ina, 2005), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942 musical), 121–22
46; in Something Strong Within Yasui, Lise. See Family Gathering, A (Yasui
(Nakamura and Ishizuka, 1994), 159; in and Tegnell, 1989)
The Women Pioneers (Aviad, 2013), Yidl in the Middle (Booth, 1999), 57
165–66; in A World Not Ours (Fleifel,
2012), 183, 186; in Y in Vyborg (Hetket Žadeikis, Povilas, 206
jotka jäivät) (Andell, 2005), 62; in Yidl in Zahra (Bakri, 2009), 180
the Middle (Booth, 1999), 57 Zimmermann, Patricia, 49–50
Vox Populi (website), 227 Zinnemann, Fred: From Here to Eternity
Vuorela, Ulla, 255–56n25 (1953), 123, 124