Horror Movies: The Presentation of the Human Body in Holocaust Films

It is not easy to watch a Holocaust film. It is disturbing, even traumatic, to see so many people endure the tortures of the ghettos and the concentration camps. And even though the pain of the victims and the grief of the survivors are not really happening to us, it is not enough to say “it’s only a movie.” It is a movie, but a movie can mean so much. In Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, she brings attention to the fact that during the aftermath of 9/11, the gruesome occurrences of that day were often recounted by witnesses as “like a movie.” This is proof that, since WWII, both the near-elimination of domestic warfare and the cementation of cinema in popular culture have caused the Western—or American, anyway—concept of extreme suffering to largely be shaped by film depiction instead of by flesh-and-blood experience. Several hundred times more war movies have been produced in the last fifty years than actual wars waged. Even the wars that have been fought have been experienced by millions more through television broadcasts than on the front lines. As audiences, we have learned to rely on cinematic imagery and sound to arouse the raw emotions provoked by hatred and by violence inside of us.

And when the hatred and violence are directed toward the human body, the reactions become visceral, even physiological. Hands sweat. Muscles tighten. Tears are produced. Nausea and headaches are induced. For better or worse, movies cause us to feel the pain of others, or at least to simulate it as well as we can. When the mutilation of the body is presented to us, our best guess at the magnitude of that pain is subconsciously reproduced inside our own bodies. Even the hardened have to train themselves not to feel what they are watching. Because films present a facsimile of the experience of torture, what their audiences go through is a facsimile of the pain of the body.

The focus of this analysis is on the presentation of bodily harm in two movies dealing with the Holocaust: Night and Fog, a documentary by the French director Alain Resnais, and Photographer, also a documentary, by the Polish director Dariusz Jablonski. In Night and Fog, the body is an object that proves the effects of Nazi violence. In Photographer, the body represents the psyche breaking down under the constraints of ghetto life and Nazi orders. While the films do not specifically deal with the significance of the human body in the Holocaust as a subject, the human form inevitably plays a role in telling the films’ respective stories.

Night and Fog

“The sadist aims at making the Other assume attitudes and positions such as his body appears under the aspect of the obscene; thus the sadist himself remains on the level of instrumental appropriation since he makes flesh emerge by exerting force upon the Other, and the Other becomes an instrument in his hands.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

The human body in Night and Fog is a form of evidence—captured once in original documentary footage obtained from the Nazis and then captured again in Resnais’ film—with no particular identity. Although Night and Fog does not recognize the individual in the concentration camp, the documentary footage employs visual cues to emphasize the conditions of the human form. The first bodies that appear in Night and Fog are those of the Nazi SS Officers. The filmmakers emphasize the cold uniformity of the marching men by placing it alongside shots of trains and wheels, followed by a montage of the different architecture forms of the concentration. From the very motions and postures of their physical forms, it is apparent that the Nazi officers are an institution, created for the same purpose as the machines or the buildings in the camps: to massacre whole groups of people in the most efficient way possible. On the opposite end from the highly organized Nazi troops, the bodies of the targeted people as they are more or less herded into the trains and into the camps are scattered, chaotic. They are confused, and the filmmakers use juxtaposition and voice-over to underscore this confusion. “The concentration camp: another planet,” the narrator of the film proclaims as a pair of terrified eyes fill the screen.

There are still photographs of the victims stripped naked. The shame of these people permeates these images: they hunch forward and keep their heads down, and some try to cover their genitalia with their hands. Some of these poses may have been forced upon them by the officers, but either way, the officers are forcing the prisoners to be ashamed, of their bodies and of themselves. Identities change in the concentration camp, and this is realized through changes to the prisoners’ physical selves. What nakedness and shaving has taken away from their identification, numbered tattoos and striped clothing replace.

It is not just the clothes and the numbers that distinguish one prisoner from another. The physical conditions of the victims themselves reveal their placement within the concentration camp. The sick people, with their crazed movements and manic facial expressions, are in one category—unable to work and all but guaranteed a painful death. The victims of the medical experiments, suffering the effects of castration and high doses of phosphorus, form another group. There are the women who make up the camp brothels, who sacrifice the last remains of their dignity in order to be slightly better fed, and the workers who will their bodies to remain strong so that they could avoid becoming one of the sick. The life that the prisoners led eventually manifested itself within their own physical forms.

One of the most significant visual cues in the concentration camp footage of Night and Fog is that of the pile. First we see piles of dishes and piles of shoes. First the belongings of the prisoners, pieces of individual lifestyles and lives, are tossed and scattered into an anonymous heap. And next there are the seemingly endless piles of women’s hair, which were apparently used to make cloth. A part of an individual person’s body, now cut away and discarded, is collected with the parts of other individuals and used to mass-manufacture a product. There are the piles of bones, which were used to make fertilizer. And there are piles and piles of bodies where it is not apparent where one body ends and another begins, or who is living and who is dead. Naked corpses, skeletons like coat hangers for decaying flesh, are thrown into pits. Some kind of bulldozer-type machine shoves an indistinguishable mass of dead bodies toward different directions. The pile is the last step in degrading the prisoners of the concentration camps. It is the final solution to Sartre’s theories on sadism. These human bodies are not treated as animals or as instruments in Sartre’s sense. They are not even bodies in this context. They are regarded simply as garbage, refuse.

Photographer

“The transposition of time and space in a technical and mental movement which is carried out with and through the body, but which does not move the body itself, is based upon the activating of memory. The medium itself becomes the location for a memory that collects corporeal images of bodies which it mentally connects to an already experienced body, that of a person, without it having to be the body in its present form.”

Gertrud Koch, Step by Step--Cut by Cut: Cinematic Worlds

One of the main differences between the representation of the human body in Night and Fog and that in Photographer is that Photographer does not focus on the body as an anonymous historical artifact, as evidence. Though most of the people depicted in the film are nameless, unlike the corpses in Night and Fog, they are not faceless. The filmmakers pay close attention to the individuality of the bodies in the slides taken by the ghetto accountant; the images are zoomed in upon and the camera lingers on them long enough to let the viewer take in what are essentially portraits of the people of the Lodz ghetto. The faces are especially important during the parts of the film in which the numbers of the fatalities of the ghetto are read. Gradually, their faces look sicker and more pained as their fates become more horrifying. The viewer almost literally sees the victims die as the causes of their deaths are read and lights are turned out on their faces.

The contrast between sick and healthy bodies also plays an integral role in the film. For example, the early slides of the ghetto workers show a healthy, beautiful, even happy group of people. The survivor being interviewed, Arnold Mostowiscz, was a doctor and did medical work in the ghetto—a healer of bodies. And yet, at almost the same time that the notes on keeping the workers healthy and happy are sent to the ghetto managers, there are letters stressing the need for “total eradication of this plague” of Jews. Sickness in the ghetto spirals out of control as time passes, and so does starvation. When the ghetto managers discover that they unable to feed all of the workers at once, they decide it would be more “humanitarian” to find an efficient way to eliminate those who are unable to work. Dr. Mostowiscz finds himself making terrible decisions on who should be put to death in order to meet the ordered quotas and most importantly, to save the others. “I have to sever the limbs to save the body!” he cries, now an old man with slow, feeble movements.

The bodies that are not captured in the slides are brought to us through Mostowiscz’s remarkably vivid memory. When considering Gertrud Koch’s theories about witnessing the body on film, it becomes apparent that the bodies of the doctor’s memory are more real than the ones in the photographs. The bodies in the slides, the ones of the beautiful and busy workers, do not resemble the ones in Mostowiscz’s recounting, and because his testimony is more accurate to what has been proven through evidence (like the footage in Night and Fog) of what has actually occurred, they are false images. This dichotomy between truth and lies only adds to the unsettling feelings provoked by the film.

Witnessing Physical Trauma on Film

“The camera accompanies the fall of the body in a corporeality that remains staged. The actor’s body no more falls from the pavement than the viewer falls from his seat. The fact that he nonetheless experiences the sensation of falling is due to the extension of the organs brought about by the camera.”

Gertrud Koch, Step by Step--Cut by Cut: Cinematic Worlds

The main objective of every Holocaust film is to make the viewer feel as close as possible to becoming a first-hand witness. If the purpose of etching the memory of the Holocaust into the international consciousness is to make people know the suffering they are capable of inflicting, then the goal of Holocaust cinema is to present the sensations of suffering through the means of image and sound. The respective presentation methods of Night and Fog and Photographer make it possible for the viewer’s mind to create the trauma that the physical world has not inflicted upon him or her. It is in this sense that the viewer becomes the witness, a separate kind of survivor.

Works Cited

Koch, Gertrude. “Step by Step--Cut by Cut: Cinematic Worlds.” Published in ReMembering the Body, edited by Gabriele Brandstetter and Hortensia Volckers. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 2000. p. 280-282.

Night and Fog [Nuit et broulliard]. Dir. Alain Resnais. Perf. Michel Bouquet. Argos Films, 1955. DVD. The Criterion Collection, 2004.

Photographer [Fotoamator]. Dir. Dariusz Jablonski. Perf. Arnold Mostowicz. Apple Film Productions/ArteBroadcastAV/Canal + Polska/Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk/TVP1, 1998. DVD. Seventh Art Releasing, 1999.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Random House, Inc. 1965. p. 265.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador Press. 2003. p.22.