Monthly Archives: February 2013

A Tale of Two Secrets-Part Three – The Horror – how to get it right

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The horror is on the inside [©2010 ]

The horror is on the inside – A Film Unfinished                          [©2007 Sophie Dulac Productions ]

The horror, the horror…

The vocabulary is literal.  So, the problem becomes for the movie maker, how do I take this literal vocabulary and find a representative image for something that is so outside the realm of any human experience? ~Sidney L. Lumet, director of The Pawn Broker [17]

In this installment of my three part series we will continue the discussion of the evolution of the media depiction of the Holocaust via a comparison and contrast of two recent European films: Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s 2010 movie Sarah’s Key and Nicolas Klotz’s Heartbeat Detector by bringing to our attention the dramatic use of horror as a quality necessary for the effective portrayal of the Nazi [in particular] crimes against humanity of the Second World War.

Spoiler Warning! [CCA Tim Davies]

Spoiler Warning! [CCA Tim Davies]

[This is your fair warning, a certain amount of the two movies Sarah’s Key and Heartbeat Detector will be revealed, that you might not want to be revealed if you haven’t watched the movies]

There is a certain quality that any movie that attempts to take on the subject of the Holocaust seriously must poses if it is not to fall flat, to fail in its responsibility to its audience, that is horror.  The horror the film maker is aiming for needs to be a type of psychological horror that the audience can perceive strongly enough to be able to distinguish what was truly unique and unprecedented about the holocaust, that it was something so vast and evil we could ordinarily never have conceived of it, from the more ordinary and human tragedy that we see in other subjects filmmakers turn their lenses to. The holocaust was something so horrific, only horror can shed light on it.  At the same time we also need to be shown that there are patterns and traces of the holocaust permeating history right up to the present day, and back further through history.

Hard to do.

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A Comment on Caravaggio and a Thought Experiment

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The Incredulity of St Thomas - Caravagio c.1601 - Truth comes to the doubter

The Incredulity of St Thomas  – Truth comes to the doubter                                    [Caravagio c.1601]

A reader left a comment on the image of The Incredulity of Saint-Thomas by Caravaggio from my March 10,2012 post: When the Uncertainty Monster Rears its Wicked Head Should We Tell the Truth?-A Comment on Curry.  And you know me well enough by this point to know that if I’m going to take the time to write a 500 word reply I’m not going to simply leave it to languish forever buried under an illustration for a year old post.

So, here it is.

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A Tale of Two Secrets – Imaginary Witnesses: one that got it wrong and one that got it right

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The Unknown Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem               [Avishai Teicher, PikiWiki]

Movie reviews are the last refuge of those who cannot write, and at least in this case, those who cannot buckle down to finish writing something he would rather not, long after the original élan for the project has left.  So, this is what you are going to get instead.

So to strike while the iron is still hot enough to strike without significant risk of it becoming overwrought [in the metallurgical sense of the word] here we go.

Actually, we do not do movie reviews as such here at MemeMerchants – we are not that sort of a blog – what we do on occasion is watch movies and then comment upon what ever we find interesting, noteworthy, or worthy of commentary or critique.  Atani is usually the one who tackles commentary on cinema and ‘the arts’, but in this case since the subject at hand intrudes upon one of my own departments and a set of topics near and dear to my heart which is: Nazism, the holocaust [in its broadest sense], and the difficulties of post-war European society in dealing with their collective responsibility for it, I’ve decided to take this one on myself.  I’m also looking for a good excuse for not dealing with finishing the piece I’m supposed to be writing – other than watching movies.

The question for today is:  what do we do about what our parents or grandparents did, or did not do during the holocaust?  What a question?  How do you deal with something that really can’t be dealt with?  How do you ‘deal with’ guilt or remorse?  What is the appropriate verb here?  The Germans have an especially great word for this process, vergangenheitsbewältigung,  ‘processing of history’, or ‘the struggle to come to terms with the past’.

The German language, gotta love it, I cannot pronounce it properly, but they’ve got such great words.

For newcomers to this blog, this vergangenheitsbewältigung is a subject that I have written about on several occasions here at MemeMerchants, most recently:  Poison in the Well of Culture-slightly off topic reflection on Collective Guilt, and also:  The Rosenstrasse Protests, Victims of Their Own Oppression, and The White Rose of Munich.

The subject of today’s essay was stimulated by watching Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s 2010 movie Sarah’s Key, which is based upon the best selling novel of the same name [Elle s’Appelait Sarah in the original French] by Tatiana de Rosnay, which deals with the subject of the July 1942 Vel’ d’Hiver Roundup and the deportation of some 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children from Nazi occupied Paris – by the French police.

Well, that ought to be interesting.

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A Tale of Two Secrets-Part Two – Escape Hatches & Errata – locking the escape hatches of Sarah’s Key

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Writing the suicide note, older Sarah [© Canal+, Studio37 - 2010]

Writing the suicide note, adult Sarah [Charlotte Poutrel]                      [© Canal+, Studio37 – 2010]

In this installment of my three part series we will continue the discussion of the evolution of the media depiction of the Holocaust via a comparison and contrast of two recent European films: Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s 2010 movie Sarah’s Key, and Nicolas Klotz’s 2007 film Heartbeat Detector by bringing our attention to what I consider to be a number of ‘escape hatches’ and other errors that the plot of Sarah’s Key was written around that dramatically limit its usefulness as a means of bringing its audience to terms with the reality of its subject matter: the July 1942 Vel’ d’Hiver Roundup and the deportation of some 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children from Nazi occupied Paris – by the French police.

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Stoat – Tutelary Beast on the Loose Again-Wikipedia and humanity’s next great leap-What’s up with that?

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Stoat_and_chipmunks

A stoat surplus killing a family of chipmunks                                                      – Ernest T. Seton 1909

Anthony Watts over at WUWT.com, his community-service-as-science-blog, has a recent post up on the reinstatement of William Connolley to Wikipedia after having been banned as an editor back in: Wikipedia Climate Fiddler William Connolley in the News Again.  Since its very short I’ll reblog the article in its entirety:

Apparently Mr. Connolley has edited 5428 Wikipedia articles, most about climate. Die Kalte Sonne:

Unbelievable but true: The Wikipedia umpire on Climate Change was a member of the UK Green Party and openly sympathized with the views of the controversial IPCC. So it was not a referee, but the 12th Man of the IPCC team.

[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kaltesonne.de%2F%3Fp%3D7858]

I’m not sure how accurate the translation is, but it suggests he was somehow part of the IPCC “short list” team. See it here at Die Kalte Sonne via this Google Translate link:

With over 5000 articles he’s edited, it makes you wonder if Mr. Connolley was employed by someone or some organization specifically for the task.

The main thrust of most subsequent commenters was to harp on the wiki-depridations of Connolley specifically and Wikipedia’s problem with out-of-control editors, and the unreliability of Wikipedia generally.  Wikipedia, naturally, has a page even on this subject: Criticism of Wikipedia.

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