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Efrén Cuevas - Filming History From Below - Microhistorical Documentaries-Columbia University Press (2022)
Efrén Cuevas - Filming History From Below - Microhistorical Documentaries-Columbia University Press (2022)
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.
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
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
The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary Edited by Alisa Lebow
The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia Edited by Elizabeth Papazian and Caroline Eades
MICROHISTORICAL
D O C U M E N TA R I E S
E F R É N C U E VA S
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Acknowledgments vii
14
41
65
viCO NTENTS
95
127
152
188
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
PÉTER FORGÁCS,
T WENTIETH- CEN TURY HI STOR I A N
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
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
FIGURE 3.2 The Maelstrom. The Peereboom family, preparing for their forced depar-
ture to a “work camp” in Germany.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
FIGURE 4.1 Something Strong Within. A Japanese American soldier from the 442nd
Regiment visiting his relatives at Minidako internment camp.
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.
these ordinary people, who fight to maintain their identity and dig-
nity as U.S. citizens of Japanese descent.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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’)
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
IS RAEL: A HOME M OV I 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.
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
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
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
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
FIGURE 6.4 For My Children. The filmmaker’s husband and son play-acting as march-
ing soldiers in a home movie.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
RE MI NI SCENCES O F A J O UR NE Y TO L I T H UAN I A
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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. 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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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
EPILOGUE
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
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
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