Review: Film and the Problem of Witnessing Reviewed Work(s): Film and Genocide by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás F. CrowderTaraborrelli Review by: Peter Freund Source: Latin American Perspectives , November 2012, Vol. 39, No. 6, TOURISM, GENDER, AND ETHNICITY (November 2012), pp. 234-235 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41702310 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Latin American Perspectives This content downloaded from 132.174.255.253 on Sun, 07 Feb 2021 19:42:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Film and the Problem of Witnessing by Peter Freund Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás F. Crowder-Taraborrelli (eds.) Film and Genocide . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Genocide as a subject for film embodies a paradox: it is unrepresentable in the magnitude of its horror and yet its image, perhaps more than any other, represents its subject to a point of excess. Film and Genocide, a new anthology of essays edited by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás F. Crowder-Taraborrelli, spans the intersection of aesthetics and ethics to show how film negotiates the impossibility of representing genocide and to elab- orate the complexity of film, filmmaking, and film viewing as ethical practices and forms of witnessing. The book opens with an overview of today's international legal-political failure to recognize and stop genocides as they occur. The editors make the point that neither public sentiment nor the official definition of genocide is adequate to mobilize the political and legal machineries to act. In this impasse, film can play a role in inspiring public discourse on genocide. What must be explored, they argue, in addition to the atrocities, is the structure of film itself. At the level of image and sound, every film poses the problem of witnessship and thus implicates the audience in the issue it raises. Part 1, "Atrocities, Spectatorship, and Memory," examines films that problematize the spectatorship of genocide. Sophia Wood's essay "Film and Atrocity" offers a nuanced comparative analysis of four prominent films on the Holocaust (Schindler 's List , Night and Fog , Shoah , and Life Is Beautiful) in relationship to the problem of "consuming atrocity." In "Documenting the Holocaust in Orson Welles's The Stranger Jennifer Barker explores how Welles in this unpopular 1946 film wove archival footage of Nazi atrocities into the narrative fabric in order to challenge the complacency and isolationism of the American public. In "Remembering Revolution after Ruin and Genocide," Michael Lazzara investigates the complex and contradictory function of nostalgia in three films commemorating the Allende period in Chile made after the intervening years of Pinochet's reign of terror (Patricio Guzmán's Salvador Allende, Carmen Castillo's Calle Santa Fe, and Miguel Littin's Compañero Presidente). Georgiana Banita's essay "The Power to Imagine" offers a close reading of Atom Egoyan's Ararat, discussing how the elaborate perspectivism of this film explores what she terms "ethical recall," a practice of memory that "draws its sharpness not from faithfulness to an event but rather from the desire to have lived it." Part 2, "Coloniality and Postcoloniality," delves into films that factor political otherness and colonial conditions into the question of genocide. "Massacre and the Movies" by Paul Bartrop argues that the murderous strife depicted in the Western Soldier Blue (1970) is constructed to suggest the historical continuity between the Native American genocide and the U.S. war against the Vietnamese. Donna Lee Frieze's chapter "The Other in Genocide" uses Emmanuel Levinas's distinction between ontological and ethical otherness to illuminate how the film Rabbit-proof Fence conceptualizes the insid- iousness of the Australian program against Aboriginals. Finally, Madelaine Hron's Peter Freund is a filmmaker, curator, and an associate professor of art practice at Saint Mary's College of California. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 187, Vol. 39 No. 6, November 2012 234-235 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X12458415 © 2012 Latin American Perspectives 234 This content downloaded from 132.174.255.253 on Sun, 07 Feb 2021 19:42:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Freund / BOOK REVIEW 235 piece "Genres of 'Yet an Other Genocide'" surveys films about the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda and proposes that these works in fact constitute a distinct film genre. Part 3, "Visual Documentation and Genocide," offers insights into the function of the document and documentation in relation to genocide. Kristi Wilson's essay "The Specter of Genocide in Errol Morris' The Fog of War " demonstrates how Morris's use of archival film materials from the World War II bombings of Japan serves as a provocative critical counterpoint to the account advanced by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the film's focal interviews. In "GI Documenting Genocide," Marsha Orgeron discusses the valuable contribution to the historical record made by unofficial, amateur films that document the liberation of the Nazi death camps. Stephen Cooper describes his week-long visit to the Open Society Archives in Budapest, an enormous library of Holocaust photography, and discusses Irek Dubrowloski's film The Portraitist and its subject, Wilhelm Brasse, a man "almost forgotten by history" who as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz worked as the photographer for Dr. Joseph Mengele. Part 4, "Interviews," furnishes absorbing interviews with three filmmakers: Greg Barker, director of Ghosts of Rwanda (2004), Nick Hughes, director of 100 Days (2001), and Irek Dubrowloski, director of The Portraitist (2005). These interviews offer conceptual and practical reflections on the filmmaking process that deeply resonate with the essays that precede them. The broad and multifaceted coverage provided by Film and Genocide introduces questions and frameworks for furthering exchanges among the disciplines it engages. Given its level of discourse, the book should prove a useful and thought-provoking text for college and university courses. One hopes that the perspectives and films discussed in this anthology will make their way beyond the academy and help elevate the public discourse on genocide. This content downloaded from 132.174.255.253 on Sun, 07 Feb 2021 19:42:35 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms