Bearing Witness in Analog and Digital Witness Films: Ethical Aesthetics in Shoah [1985] and Waltz with Bashir [2008]
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: In the ongoing and passionate debates over the digitalization of visual media, many questions about the ontology or materiality of the new digital image have been raised. Analog representation is often thought of in terms of indexicality and sometimes a naive belief in the truthfulness of the photographic image, whereas the digital image is, in a way, no longer an image anymore, but a set of data in flux, superficially coded and easy to manipulate. The following article examines how this shift to digitalization affects the ethical genre per se: the witness film. In a film analytical close reading of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, resonances become visible to psychoanalysis, Deleuzian film philosophy and the debates over the materiality of the analog and digital image. Lanzmann draws on a specific kind of indirect indexicality, which is highly interested in the psychic and embodied realities of surviving, witnessing and the passing of time, whereas Folman develops a politics of the powers of the false: truthfulness, accessibility and memorability are abolished in favor of false images, screen-memories and traumatic mis/representation, which are staged noticeably digital and altered, revolving around the impossibility to grasp the ungraspable.
Source: Genealogy
Author: Louis Levi Breitsohl
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,256
OpenAlex ID: W4212945882