ABSTRACT
The cinematic mode of representation achieves partial verisimilitude not only with immediate experience but also with primary process. The language of film approximates the language of psychoanalysis and, like the dream, reveals and conceals, exposing defenses against knowing. Every dream reaches into the unknown, beyond the attribution of meaning. So too with movies, which fail to fully encompass and master the Holocaust. Something is always left unarticulated.
Holocaust movies expose difficulties representing and knowing trauma. They reflect stages in the never to be completed process of symbolization, points on the continuum from the self becoming trauma to trauma being witnessed by a self. Defenses are a major component of knowing trauma, extending from denial and dissociation to creation of screen memories involving fetishistic attachment to facts and fantasies that defend against the Real. The more we descend into the actual details of the Holocaust, the more the mind loses its bearings and anchoring in reality, and the more defense, fantasy, and madness hold sway.
Viewers imbibe affects organized on screen like an infant seduced at Mother’s breast. With Holocaust films, we are all as if drinkers of Paul Celan’s “black milk” of mourning, sucking in characters’ terror as we imaginatively form relationships with them, feeling suffocated. Annihilation anxiety reaches its apex as one finds oneself in the realm of the psychotic, causing shifts to soothing mechanisms that exist in fantasy. Any story about the Holocaust is a delusion, a wisp in the air. From such wisps, humans spin films.
