Arresting Images: Inhabiting the Nazi archive in Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished

Abstract

The filmic appropriation of archival imagery has become pivotal within the new archival economy of memory. What is particularly striking about this transnational trend is that more than a reproduction of images of the past for illustrative purposes, at stake in many recent appropriation films is a post-memorial fascination with archival images and simultaneously a critical interrogation of their epistemological gaps, their conditions of production, and their role in shaping the memory of historical violence. Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010), which refigures a Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw ghetto, is a symptomatic case where the enigmatic appeal of archival images coexists with a suspicious examination of their constitutive flaws. Through close reading of the film, and a discussion of Derrida’s notion of “archive fever” in relation to the Nazi archival culture, this article will inquire into the dynamics of archive imagery at play within contemporary cinematic practices, arguing that the disappearance of the witness has raised a renewed crisis of representation of the Holocaust, in which the archive becomes a critical but fraught centrepiece.