Abstract
This chapter, on Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath, argues that the structure of Lacanian anamorphosis can productively be thought together with Derrida’s writing on spectrality. In Derridean discourses of hauntology, the spectral is something that looks at and addresses us, before and beyond our awareness of this look. Considering anamorphosis and the asymmetrical structure of spectrality assists this chapter’s identification of a network of images and objects (including anti-Semitic graffiti, gravestones, and the iconic image of a burning barn) that provoke both characters and viewers to reframe their visions of the present and the past. The cinematic ‘séance’ that Aftermath evokes, is not, however, predicated on the supernatural, but rather one that recognises the ‘unacknowledged continuities’ (Dziuban) between past and present cycles of violence.
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Notes
- 1.
Davis has argued that Derrida’s spectre ‘edges onto becoming the Lacanian Big Other, the despot whose laws we obey only because we cannot rid ourselves of our dependence on it’ (2007, 91). However, Davis also refers us to Žižek’s Lacanian critique of the Derridean spectre. For Žižek, spectrality ‘fills out the unrepresentable abyss of […] the non-symbolized real’, rather than being the apparition of an Other to whom we are indebted (1994, 26–27).
- 2.
My italics.
- 3.
Maciej Stuhr’s image appeared on the cover of political magazine Wprost in November 2012 with a graffitied Star of David and the word ‘Żyd’ (‘Jew’) superimposed over his face. The headline read ‘Maciej Stuhr lynched at his own request’, a reference to his defence of Aftermath. Janicka has argued that this headline reveals an assumption that by attacking Polish anti-Semitism one is asking to be lynched (2018, 49).
- 4.
- 5.
I have considered elsewhere how Aftermath compares with films dealing with repressed histories through the Gothic genre (Mroz 2016). See Janicka (2018, 93) for further discussion of Aftermath’s deployment of the Western. She notes that, in Polish culture, the Western tends to be associated with the cult of the noble Catholic knight. Aftermath inverts this, she argues, by presenting a vision of a society constructed on anti-Semitism, robbery and murder, which cannot quite be restored to justice by the end.
- 6.
For Żukowski, Aftermath’s generic borrowings are reminiscent of a hijack: the film draws viewers into a mysterious and exciting investigation, only to deny them the expected catharsis by locating ‘evil’ not in something that can be cast out and purged, but right at the heart of Polish society (2017, 336–338).
- 7.
It is worth noting that folklore is often closely tied to religion; both function as ‘the basis for one’s understanding of the world, social rules, and most of all identity’ (Janicka and Żukowski 2016, 47). For Propp, folklore is ‘part of the system of religious-ceremonial practice’ (1984, 11). Lehrer and Sendyka argue that a recurring tendency of Holocaust-themed Polish folk art involves using Catholic imagery in a way that effaces Jewish suffering and appropriates it for ‘the needs of Polish Catholic martyrdom’ (2019, 9). Aftermath seems to both draw on and expose this kind of mechanism.
- 8.
Józef’s crucifixion generated controversy. Henryk Grynberg (n.d.), for example, considered it unbelievable and an unnecessary ‘emotional reinforcement’. Pasikowski has defended the image by likening Aftermath to a ‘passion play’, which needs a crucifixion (Quart 2013, 25). He was also inspired by an actual incident where ‘a few decades ago, a boy was crucified for some mundane reasons’ and decided to embed this event into the narrative of anti-Jewish violence (Quart 2013, 25).
- 9.
Violence, Nancy argues, maintains an ‘essential link’ with images. ‘The torturers’ violence is the exhibition—at least for his own eyes—of the wounds of the victim’ (2005, 21). For Nancy, the crucifixion, in imaging ‘the god who shed his blood to save mankind’, epitomises the cruelty and violence that inheres in images (2005, 25).
- 10.
- 11.
There are, of course, many differences between the two films, not least that Birthplace is a documentary about a returning Holocaust survivor, and Aftermath a fiction film about a returning perpetrator’s son.
- 12.
Both Rancière and Margulies are here commenting on perpetrator re-enactments in Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (Cambodia/France, 2003).
- 13.
The phrase appears, for example, in the booklet accompanying the 2012 DVD release. In commenting on Baksik’s photographs of Jewish gravestones, Gross also imbues them with agency. He writes: ‘perhaps these matzevot scattered about Poland have wandered in search of their dead?’ (Gross 2012, 35).
- 14.
In Archive Fever, Derrida also compares ‘archaeological excavation’ with ‘the detection of the archive’, noting that they are both similar and incompatible (1995, 39, 58). Haunting , too, is bound up with the archive: ‘the structure of the archive is spectral’, he argues, as it conjures ‘a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met, no more than those of Hamlet’s father’ (1995, 54).
- 15.
The title of this section borrows from Colin Davis’s 2007 book Haunted Subjects.
- 16.
See also Cholodenko (2004) who draws on Abraham and Torok in discussing cinema itself as a crypt.
- 17.
Franek might not quite be the ‘scholar’ of Hamlet who is enjoined to speak with the ghost, but his position distantly echoes those of actual scholars breaking the taboos about Polish perpetration in their research. As noted in Chap. 2, these scholars have frequently been characterised as unwanted outsiders who defame Poland’s good name, a criticism levelled particularly against Gross; they have often been subjected to anti-Semitic abuse.
- 18.
Davis takes as a ‘sign of resistance or denial’ the fact that Derrida, while writing prefaces for the psychoanalysts’ work and introducing it to a wider audience, never explicitly commented on the differences between their construction of spectrality and his own (2007, 83).
- 19.
There are echoes here of Wojciech Wilczyk’s photography and video work, which records anti-Semitic graffiti in everyday Polish landscapes and the ways in which it is studiously ignored by passers-by (see for example his 2014 film We Are All Soccer Yobs). For Janicka and Żukowski, Wilczyk’s work suggests that anti-Semitic writing forms ‘part of the Polish landscape as something natural and obvious by itself. It does not disturb because nobody perceives it as a problem’ (2016, 129). Zawadzka refers to anti-Semitic graffiti as a ‘scenography’, a mise-en-scene, of everyday life; it creates a society of bystanders and a culture of acceptance of anti-Semitism (Zawadzka cited in Janicka 2014/2015, 180).
- 20.
Since the Kalina brothers have been targeted by anti-Semitic graffiti, it is possible that Franek sees the hanged Star of David as specifically referring to him, although it has pre-existed his arrival in the town.
- 21.
Holland also, however, warns us against ‘lumping cinema, psychoanalysis and deconstruction together’; Derrida denied that ‘his work was a variety of psychoanalysis’ (2015, 53).
- 22.
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Mroz, M. (2020). Aftermath’s Cinematic Séance: Anamorphosis, Spectrality and Sentient Matter. 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_4
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