If you don't speak Italian I suggest to use Google translator. Taofilms Vod sadly is not available anymore, but you can watch both films on Vimeo free of charge. The Italian critic mentioning the Oscar Winning Son of Shaul, Laszlo Nemes masterpiece and highlighted, in spite of we're using different filmmaking language both films are paying respect and tribute to the Shoah.
I copy here the Google rough English translation, though if you speak Italian I suggest you to CLICK Here
The English title translation would've been something like "Tracing the unpresentable by Janos Kis
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The English title translation would've been something like "Tracing the unpresentable by Janos Kis
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In the third part of his short Three essays on the image , entitled The interdict image , Jean-Luc Nancyhe deals with a theme that characterized the aesthetic discussion of the second half of the last century: "with regard to the representation of the camps or the Shoah, the thesis circulates, not well defined, but insistent, that one cannot or should not represent extermination". It is (va) a theme with unclear reasons. What is the nature of this interdiction? There is talk of "an impossibility or an illegitimacy?" In the first case, what would make this representation impossible? “It certainly cannot be thought of as a technical question”; "Does it perhaps depend on the unsustainable nature of what must be represented?" But Nancy objects to this same assumption, bringing as examples numerous artistic cases in which something terribly horrendous (such as, for example, the "horrors of war painted by Goya" or the "scenes of wounds and atrocious deaths in many films"). “If, on the other hand, it is a question of illegitimacy, it refers to a religious ban, which is evoked out of its context, without justifying this shift in any way. There is then a shift in this prohibition, which concerns God first, to the person of the exterminated Jews (and then to that of the other victims) ”. But, the French philosopher explains later, " to the person of the exterminated Jews (and then to that of the other victims) ”. But, the French philosopher explains later, " to the person of the exterminated Jews (and then to that of the other victims) ”. But, the French philosopher explains later, "the representation is not a simulacrum: it is not the substitution of the original thing - in truth, it does not refer to a thing: it is the presentation of what is not reduced to a given and completed presence (or given as completed), or it is the placing in the presence of an intelligible reality (or form) through the formal mediation of a sensitive reality ". In the representation of horror, therefore, whatever the nature of the imposed ban, there is no form of disrespect, which seems to me to be the true root of this unrepresentability. According to this thesis, the Holocaust must not be shown because it would be, in short, a reduction of its dramatic, tragic and horrific significance.
However, there are artists who have been able to represent this Unrapresentable without diminishing it but, on the contrary, paying due respect and tribute to what it was. The best example, in my opinion, is The Son of Saul by László Nemes (in this regard, I refer to the reading of this wonderful article in Il Tempo Impresso ) but there are also other authors who, with different tools and methods, have been able to recall the 'Irrepresentable without falling into vulgar spectacularization or trivialization (both usually endowed with a sometimes irritating pathetism, as in the case of La vita è bella by Roberto Benigni , or in the novel by John Boynefirst and in the respective adaptation by Mark Herman then The boy in the striped pajamas ). This is the case of another Hungarian author, a photojournalist and director of short films called Janos Kis who in 2017 shot two shorts that do not show the Irrapresentabile, do not reproduce it, do not represent it but instead show the traces left. From it. In Fear and Requiem for the forgotten (both available on the streaming platform dedicated to slow cinema Tao Films ), in fact, we do not see events, we do not see actions: we only see the footprints of history, remains of the past.
In Fear, specifically, we see three shots that portray, as will be explained by the credits, the crematoria of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau, of which another area is also shown. Requiem for the forgotten (in the opening credits presented with an error like “Requiem for the forgottens”), on the other hand, shows shoes without owners, scattered in disorder on the bank of the Danube, which crosses Budapest. In about 24 minutes overall (just under 10 Fear, 14 Requiem), Kis evokes, through images that reject any form of cinematographic tinsel, a past that is now seen as distant, disconnected from our present.. Our present is here, nearby, where we are; the Shoah belongs to another universe, to another time, another reality. However, the four sequence shots that make up the two films show how that other reality, that other universe, that other time are just behind us, tremendously present, tremendously real.
Fear, in particular, the strongest and most interesting of the two works, directly portraying those places, now in ruins, abandoned to the care of tourism and nature, places the viewer in front of the undeniable truth. Not representing the Irrepresentable, Kis delegates this atrocious task to the public, forced by that silent stillness that has now replaced the hopeless moans of the Häftlinge (prisoners) the furious cries of the Kapos and the SS to rebuild or, at least, to try to reconstruct the hell that those places represented for millions of people, those places from which "one only leaves the Camino", according to a sad catchphrase, a very adequate term, that Primo Levi (locked up in Auschwitz, by Monowitz) recalls in If This Is a Man. And the viewer sees those fireplaces, sees them as they are now, at rest, out of service, oblivious to their infamous, chilling, disgusting function. Forget, because inanimate matter has no memory. Man, on the other hand, this mass of living matter, has memory, unfortunately and, at the same time, fortunately. Not only of what he experienced in the first person but also of what in front of his eyes and mind was shown in the third. Those chimneys, today, no longer free the Häftlinge from their imprisonment of the flesh but, in our eyes, they continue to do so. Those structures, which have no longer become places of torture and endless suffering but tourist attractions(in the first shot of Fear, in the background, behind a small elevation of the ground, we can glimpse the heads of a group that is visiting the camp), they continue to torture and cause endless suffering, because this is the reason why they were born . They do it through memory, through that Irrepresentable that re-emerges from the past in presentations , more often with trivializing works such as Life is Beautiful, very rarely with the chilling force of The Son of Saul (whose stories narrated , although slightly different, can also be found in Levi's The Drowned and Saved ).
Silence, both in Fear and in Requiem for the forgotten, does not reveal itself only as human stillness, as the absence of words. Silence speaks the language of the wind, which is a constant spectator of human tragedy. In both shorts, in fact, the spectator's ear is constantly accompanied by the gentle but insistent breath of the wind, which whispers its eternal memory to the spectator: it is up to the latter, finally, to listen to its voice, to decipher the madness of that History that he has never been able to know firsthand, the unimaginable tragedy of those stories that he has never been able to live and which are now forgotten by man, guarded only by the noisy, heavy and intrusive silence of the wind. Those shoes in front of which the water of the Danube flows placid and indifferent may not belong to the same universe,
Thus, Kis proposes with these two short films an alternative solution to the representation of the Irrapresentabile, different but, basically, not as distant as it might appear from the one presented by Laszlo Nemes in The Son of Saul. As illustrated by Mattia Fiorinoin the article on the blog Il Tempo Impresso, Nemes chooses to “focus on the eyes of her only protagonist and put the rest out of focus”, an option that seems to be the only possible solution to the problem of the unrepresentability of the Holocaust. Kis, on the other hand, bypasses this obstacle by not showing a representation of the Shoah but by portraying it, in the case of Fear, or by reconstructing its traces in Requiem for the Forgotten. The two Hungarian directors resort to an almost antithetical approach: if in the case of the Oscar-winning director, in fact, we witness a re-elaboration, albeit always kept in the background, of those traumatic and atrocious events, Janos Kis does not re-elaborate anything, he simply documents, he draws from present to recall the past, where the former drew from the past itself. Both, however, entrust the spectator with the arduous and thankless task of reconstructing the horrors that are suggested, unrepresented or relegated to where they cannot really harm: “the off-screen is filled and created by the beholder”.
Finally, it is precisely in this that the unrepresentability of the Irrapresentable, of the Holocaust (and of God, if we agree with the shift highlighted by Nancy) lies hidden. Not so much in a moral question, in a form of respect for the victims, famous or forgotten they are, but rather in our need not to look, not to remember, to protect ourselves from that unsustainable horror; the Irrepresentable is such not out of nobility but out of cowardice , not out of ethical and respectful altruism but out of selfishness.
