Abstract
The close analysis of Paweł Łoziński’s documentary Birthplace in this chapter is informed by the work of Levinas and Deleuze, and their deployment in film-philosophy. The chapter draws on the Deleuzian notion of stratigraphic images to consider how Henryk Grynberg’s difficult homecoming to a frequently hostile rural landscape is layered with spoken recollections and narratives, creating distinct though interrelated strata that the film sifts through. The film’s actual process of excavating human remains from unmarked ‘non-sites’ (Sendyka) materialises this archaeological metaphor. Levinas’s writing on our ethical obligation to the stranger/neighbour, emanating from the face or visage, is drawn on to consider how Birthplace evokes and performs multiple encounters between human subjects within the film and between the film and the viewer.
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Notes
- 1.
Critics have often used the vocabulary of archaeology and exhumation when discussing the film. Łysak (2016, 284), for example, calls the film an ‘archaeological investigation’ , while Litka terms it an ‘exhumation of memory’ (2011, 883). He connects this to the driving force behind Grynberg’s own writing, which he considers to be akin to a kind of ‘exhumation’ of Holocaust victims and a preservation of their material traces (2011, 884). Prager (2015, 64) describes the film as mediated through an ‘excavator’s gaze ’.
- 2.
In this layering I follow a number of film theorists who have considered Levinasian thought alongside that of Deleuze and Guattari, including Cooper (2006, 28). Girgus (2010) argues that Deleuze ‘advances elements that can help in applying Levinasian theory to film’, particularly as he postulates ‘the importance of a discordant temporal order for new ethical discourse’, and imagines a cinema able to free ‘the imagination from closed boundaries of thought’ (2010, 223). Girgus associates the disjunctions of the Deleuzian time-image with a Levinasian ‘diachronic time’ ‘beyond ordinary linear time’ (2010, 56). See also Harvey (2017), who entwines Levinasian and Deleuzian approaches to the face .
- 3.
- 4.
For a history and analysis of Shoah’s reception in Poland, see Kwieciński (2012).
- 5.
For Molisak (2019, 49) Grynberg as a writer can also be defined as a ‘medium’, as he positions himself as a subject speaking on behalf of those who perished in the Holocaust , including his own family and friends. She describes his oeuvre as ‘mediumistic’.
- 6.
Łysak calls the film an ‘investigative documentary’ (2016, 153). See also Prager , who compares Grynberg to a ‘dogged detective’ ‘in the mode of Lanzmann ’ (2015, 64). Given what we know about the film’s production it might be more accurate to think of Łoziński in this role, though he himself is never visible or audible in the film (he might also, considering the comments he has made about Shoah , object to the comparison).
- 7.
This citation is taken from Grynberg’s book Dziedzictwo (variously interpreted as Inheritance or Legacy), published in the year following the release of Birthplace (1993a). It is made up of a series of monologues by, and dialogues with, the villagers interviewed during filming. The work includes scraps of conversation that didn’t make it into the finished film, a section containing Grynberg’s recollections (some of which were used in the film’s voice-overs) and his further reflections on the filming process.
- 8.
See also Cinquegrani (2018), who has eloquently pursued the idea of the journey, as literal and figurative, in Birthplace.
- 9.
See Grynberg (1993b, 17).
- 10.
Russell is here referring to the look of an owl towards the camera in Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986).
- 11.
In his critique of Russell’s analysis, for example, Burt notes that ‘there is no presumption here that the look of an animal might be an active one’, and there is a slippage between the notion that we do not have access to the animal’s thinking, and the idea that the animal has no ‘thinking’ at all (Burt 2002, 41–42).
- 12.
For Eaglestone, the image of bread in Levinas’s writing more specifically references the concentration camp , where to give one’s own ration to another, when one is at the point of starvation, is literally to give yourself to them (2004, 258).
- 13.
Spargo notes how the figures of the stranger and the neighbor change throughout Levinas’s body of work. After ‘Enigma and Phenomenon’ the neighbour for Levinas comes to signify not so much a relation of familiarity but of proximity, not of knowledge but of responsibility even towards those whom one does not know (Spargo 2006, 212).
- 14.
As Waterson writes, testimonial narration is a performative act that is partly produced through relationships between interviewer, testifier, and actual or imagined audience (Waterson 2007, 51).
- 15.
This statement reminds us that Jewish shops before WWII were sometimes boycotted in villages, and both Jewish shopkeepers and the non-Jewish people who shopped there were sometimes attacked by nationalist Poles.
- 16.
Other statements by the villagers are openly hostile, however. For example, one man opines that Jewish people were stupid for circumcising their sons and comes close to blaming them for their fate during the Holocaust .
- 17.
In Guzmán’s film, the searchers are women who routinely comb the Atacama Desert for the remains of those ‘disappeared’ by the Pinochet regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Guzmán’s approach to history is admittedly more expansive than Łoziński’s; the film reaches back to the origins of life on Earth . See Martin-Jones (2019, especially 91–118) for an extended analysis of the earth as a planetary archive .
- 18.
In this I am also following Saxton’s example. Saxton locates Shoah’s ethics not in Lanzmann’s relationship to his interviewees but in the relationship between the film and its viewers (2010, 101). For an important account of the ethics of the relationship between filmmaker and subject (including in Shoah ), see Piotrowska (2014, 132–145).
- 19.
See also Harvey (2017) who pursues a similar argument in relation to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film The Master (USA).
- 20.
Once again, I take inspiration from Saxton’s writing on Shoah (2010, 103).
- 21.
There were, however, traces of human activity below the surface of this site; as Grynberg describes, an excavation of the dugout revealed fragments of pottery, wood, and metal (1993a, 88). This dig is not shown in the film.
- 22.
Curiously, Prager argues that ‘this ill-defined space both is and is not a cemetery; bones remain there’ (2015, 66). It should be noted that the villagers state that there are no human remains under this surface. Grynberg also writes that no human remains were found during the excavation of the site, though he describes the dugout as the ‘grave of my mother’s entire family’ (1993a, 90).
- 23.
For Mąka-Malatyńska , the milk bottle recalls Zofia Nałkowska’s short story ‘Kobieta Przy Torze Kolejowym’/‘By the Railway Track’ from the collection Medaliony/Medallions (1946), and Andrzej Brzozowski’s film adaptation, Przy Torze Kolejowym/By the Railway Track (Poland, 1963). These works revolve around a heavily injured Jewish woman who has escaped from a rail transport heading to a camp . The local Polish villagers do not help her, though they leave her a cup of milk. She is eventually shot by a Polish policeman after pleading for death .
- 24.
Abram was reburied in Warsaw’s Powązki Cemetery, but this is not shown in the film.
- 25.
Commenting on Levinas’s writing on suffering, particularly in relation to the Holocaust , Cohen describes how suffering denotes the ‘meaningless painfulness of pain’ which is ‘intrinsically excessive, unwanted, not to be accommodated’ (2009, 274). There are parallels here with Brinkema’s writing on how grief highlights the ‘peculiar painfulness’ of pain (2014, 70). I will return to Brinkema’s work on grief in Chap. 5.
- 26.
‘Peace and Proximity’ comments on the state of Europe after two world wars, genocide and imperial exploitation. Aptly for this chapter, the events of Vassili Grossman’s Life and Fate take place during WWII and the Holocaust , and describes what Levinas has called a ‘completely dehumanized’ society (1999, 106). Grossman visited Treblinka with Red Army troops after the camp’s liberation in 1944 and described its operations. He accompanied members of the Polish-Soviet Commission for Investigation of German Crimes, who recommended the preservation of the camp’s documents and analysis of its mass graves (Gross with Grudzińska-Gross 2012, 20). This report went largely unheeded and the camp fell into neglect. It was in part this lack of safeguarding that provided the conditions for some Polish citizens (and Soviet soldiers) to sift through the human remains searching for gold. What has been termed a ‘Gold Rush’ at Treblinka has been described by, amongst others , Gross and Grudzińska-Gross (2012) and Rusiniak (2008), though these accounts are disputed (see Chap. 2).
- 27.
See in particular Cooper’s analysis of the ending of La Promesse (Belgium/France, 1996), in which the young protagonist Igor confesses to the refugee Assita that his own father was responsible for the death of her husband. This confession is delivered to her back as she faces away from Igor, who is also filmed with his back to the camera. This image of ‘staggered backs’ ‘enables the filmic rendering of the Levinasian ethical encounter’ (2007, 72).
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Mroz, M. (2020). Posthumous Landscapes and the Earth-Archive: Archaeology, Ethics and Birthplace. In: Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema. Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46166-7_3
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