“Non-sites of memory”

Vice, Sue and Williams, Dominic (2021) “Non-sites of memory”. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media (21). pp. 35-54. ISSN 2009-4078

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Abstract

This article analyses some of the thirty hours of location footage excluded from Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary Shoah. Although there has been some analysis of the outtake material in Lanzmann’s archive which consists of eyewitness interviews, very little attention has been paid to the footage of landscape, urban and camp settings, from which we have drawn these examples of Polish sites. We argue that it is possible to discern the presence of a specifically spatial memory by considering this excluded material in a way that draws on its outtake status, that is, its form of eleven-minute reels unaccompanied by eyewitness presence or voiceover. The filmic construction of spaces to suit Lanzmann’s concerns is revealed if we attend to this material in its unedited state, with its constituent repetitions and exclusions, as a spatial version of the director’s customary interest in the reincarnation of the past in the present.

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