Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

‘The Most Profound Shock’: Traces of the Holocaust in Sam Fuller's Verboten ! (1959) and the Big Red One (1980)

2007; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439680701552547

1465-3451

Marsha Orgeron,

German History and Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments My deepest gratitude goes to Christa Lang Fuller, who facilitated my exploration of Sam Fuller's 16-mm ‘home movies’ at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy Film Archive. Thanks to the Archive's director, Michael Pogorzelski, and to Snowden Becker for archival assistance that has gone well beyond the call of duty. Special thanks to Jonathan Auerbach, Frances Guerin, Devin Orgeron, and Maria Pramaggiore for their comments on drafts of this article, and to Emil Weiss, who provided me a copy of Falkenau, The Impossible. Notes Notes 1 The quote in the title of this article is from the ‘Falkenau’ chapter of Sam Fuller's posthumously published autobiography, A Third Face [hereafter ATF] (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 213–214. I use the term ‘Holocaust’ in the title of this essay to signify the Nazi's systematic attempt to persecute, contain, and eradicate European Jews. However, due to the ambiguity concerning the religious and ethnic identities of many of the inmates at Falkenau—Fuller describes them as ‘a tragic mix of Jews, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and antifascist Germans’ (ATF 215)—I also use the term with an awareness that Fuller encountered and addressed the broader campaign against individuals and groups whom the Nazi's perceived as inferior or dangerous, and therefore as subject to persecution and internment. 2 Fuller's original 16-mm film made at Falkenau has been deposited by Christa Lang Fuller at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy Film Archives. I have discussed this 16-mm film in detail in Liberating Images: the politics of witnessing in Sam Fuller's amateur war movie, Film Quarterly, 60(2) (Winter 2006), 38–47. 3 According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia, ‘On May 8, 1945, units of the 1st liberated Zwodau and Falkenau an der Eger, both subcamps of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Both camps were located on territory that today is in the Czech Republic … Falkenau housed 60 prisoners.’ See http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10006132. The SS began a forced evacuation of around 22,000 prisoners from Flossenbürg on April 20, 1945, in a ‘death march from the main camp toward Dachau in Germany,’ just three days before U.S. troops liberated the camp (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005537). In an email dated May 29, 2007, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Senior historian Peter Black clarifies that Flossenbürg—an SS concentration camp established in May of 1938 near stone quarries—had subcamps in the annexed Sudetenland as well as in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and that Falkenau is some 9–12 miles north northeast of Flossenbürg. But there remains significant confusion when trying to pin down details about the camp that Fuller's division liberated. In a June 14, 2007 email, Peter Black affirmed that the 1st Division liberated a facility in Falkenau on May 8, 1945, but according to USHMM records the facility held only female prisoners from Zwodau, a women's subcamp of Flossenbürg. However, there is not a single woman prisoner—alive or dead—in Fuller's footage. Black further explained that Falkenau camp appears to have been liquidated in July 1944, but that ‘the documentary record breaks down in Zwodau after the middle of April 1945,’ noting that it is possible that other agencies—like the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office)—or even civilian authorities may have run a camp in the Falkenau area that has not been adequately documented. It is clear that the complex network of subcamps, especially at the chaotic close of the war, requires ongoing investigation and that every artifact that surfaces —such as Fuller's 16-mm film— offers a missing piece of the puzzle. 4 The quote is from Emil Weiss's Falkenau: The Impossible (France, 1988), a documentary in which Fuller discusses his 16-mm Falkenau footage. The only available film copy of Weiss's documentary in North America resides at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy Film Archive; Emil Weiss was kind enough to send me a copy of the film. My viewing of Weiss's film has unearthed a bit of a mystery: Fuller's 16-mm ‘V-E + 1’ film, contained within Weiss's, begins with handwritten black titling on white paper, whereas the copy on deposit at AMPAS begins with shots of commercially produced, but still amateur-style, white lettering. At some point Fuller must have re-shot the title sequence, but it is unclear when this happened or what happened to the presumably original handwritten title sequence. 5 Hanna Caven discusses the outrage expressed by some of the liberators at Belsen over the dehumanizing implications of bulldozing bodies into mass graves. It should be noted that the liberation of Belsen transpired before the unconditional surrender of German forces, and that the 10,000 plus dead found by liberating soldiers there does not compare with the comparatively modest scale of Falkenau. Caven asserts that burying these ‘forgotten dead’ was part of a larger attempt to mentally rehabilitate the survivors, to establish ‘some sense of moral order’ from the chaos of the camp. For a thorough account of the Belsen liberation, see Hanna Caven, Horror in our time: images of the concentration camps in the British media, 1945, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 21 (2001), 214ff. 6 For more on the witnessing rituals taking place at liberated concentration camps and on the politics of photographing and disseminating images of these acts see Robert Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the liberation of Nazi concentration camps (New York, Oxford, 1985); Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: views of war and violence (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1996); Susan Carruthers, Compulsory viewing: concentration camp film and German re-education, Millennium, 30(3) (2001), 733–759; Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust Interpretations of the Evidence (New York, I.B. Tauris, 2004); Carol Zemel, Emblems of atrocity: Holocaust liberation photographs, in Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (eds) Image and Remembrance: representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 2003); and Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: televising the Holocaust (New York, Oxford, 1999). 7 In his discussion of the use of documentary footage at the Nuremberg trials, Lawrence Douglas makes the point that the compiled documentary film, Nazi Concentration Camps, used at the tribunal actually ‘provides few clues as to who is responsible for the atrocities in a more tangible, i.e., juridical, sense’ and that therefore ‘the film fails to clarify more specific questions of legal responsibility.’ Lawrence Douglas, Film as witness: screening Nazi Concentration Camps before the Nuremberg Tribunal, Yale Law Journal, 105 (November 1995), 473. 8 Stella Bruzzi comes to a similar conclusion about the ‘Zapruder film’ of John F. Kennedy's assassination: ‘the non-fictional image's mimetic power cannot stretch to offering a context or an explanation for the crude events on the screen.’ Furthermore, ‘The Zapruder film shows us everything and it shows us nothing; it is explicit but cannot conclusively confirm or deny any version of the assassination.’ New Documentary: a critical introduction (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1998), 16 and 18. 9 For example, in Fuller's ‘Falkenau’ chapter of ATF he discusses other discoveries at the camp that are not included in this film, most notably the crematorium and mounds of human teeth, eyeglasses, and artificial limbs (ATF 214). 10 Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992), 17. 11 Ibid. 12 I want to make it clear that I do not think that Fuller witnessed the Holocaust, per se, but rather some very specific effects of the Holocaust and the larger Nazi campaign, and these under particular circumstances as an American soldier involved in the liberation of the camps. Any liberating soldier's experience of the camps or the treatment of its prisoners would differ tremendously from the experience of camp prisoners, or Nazi soldiers, or civilians for that matter. 13 In keeping with Fuller's journalistic and personally experiential modus operandi, Verboten! is ‘ripped from the headlines of that time’ (AFT 369) and The Big Red One is based on Fuller's war experiences, albeit recast in semi-autobiographical form. Fuller kept detailed journals during the war, including sketches and story ideas that he used throughout his career, and his films are almost always based on real-world events, his own or someone else's. 14 Note that the chief counsel at Nuremberg was Robert H. Jackson, not Charles H. Jackson. 15 Given Fuller's generous inclusion of documentary footage in Verboten!, it is curious that Stanley Kramer's later film, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), has been so widely acclaimed and debated for its seven-minute newsreel footage sequence which, Alan Mintz has argued, ‘was the first time in general American mass culture in which the terrible things that had been done to the Jews of Europe were being publicly acknowledged.’ Alan Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle, WA, University of Washington Press, 2001), 103. In A Third Face, Fuller explains that Columbia distributed Verboten! ‘and did pretty well with the picture at the box office’ (ATF 372), which means that Fuller was really the first film-maker to present this material in a mainstream film. However, Fuller's film cannot be compared in terms of its familiarity to American audiences to Kramer's highly visible, star-studded tale about the trials. See also Lawrence Douglas, Film as witness, for a brief discussion of the use of footage from Nazi Concentration Camps, made for the Nuremberg trials, in Kramer's film, 477. 16 Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: the demands of Holocaust representation (London, University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 99. 17 Lawrence Douglas, Film as witness, 472. 18 Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: views of war and violence (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1996), 6. 19 Although I am unsure of the sources of Fuller's documentary footage beyond what he states in A Third Face, readers should consult Frances Guerin's The energy of disappearing: problems of recycling Nazi amateur film footage, Screening the Past (http://www.latrobe.edu/au/screeningthepast/stp17/newfirstrelease/fr17/FGfr17.html) for a discussion of the use of Nazi film footage in popular culture and the various ideological implications of such uses. Guerin's discussion of the oscillation between ‘film as record and as representation’ is especially relevant here. 20 Hanna Caven, Horror in our time, 239. 21 From the Core Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, CA. Unpaged review of Verboten! Motion Picture Herald, March 21, 1959. 22 All of the reviews cited in this paragraph are from the Core Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, CA. None of them are paged. 23 Anti-Nazi ‘Verboten’ is Banned in Israel, Hollywood Reporter, June 7, 1960, unpaged. From the Core Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, CA. 24 There were, in fact, significant concerns about ensuring that the liberation footage being shot by official Allied photographers appeared untampered with to combat possible future claims of fakery or special effects. See, for example, the affidavits that appear in Stevens's Nazi Concentration Camps and the letters surrounding the making of the film that was broadcast as Frontline: Memory of the Camps that are reproduced in Elizabeth Sussex, The Fate of F3080, Sight and Sound, 53(2) (Spring 1984), 92–97. 25 Robert H. Jackson, quoted from the Tribunal proceedings by Lawrence Douglas, Film as witness, 450. 26 See ATF for Fuller's explanation of this witnessing and of the frustrating proximity of the townspeople to the camp, 213–218. 27 As will be discussed momentarily, the phrasing here invokes Fuller's statement about his intentions in making The Big Red One (ATF 475). 28 As Fuller explains to Jim Jarmusch in Tigrero (1994), his personal 16-mm footage ends up in a number of his films. Fuller explains that he would often put a ‘W’ in his scripts signifying ‘a weird flavor of the film’ which meant that he would insert his own previously shot, idiosyncratic footage. Fuller discusses in some detail his use of color footage he shot in the 1950s in Brazil in his black-and-white film Shock Corridor (1963). 29 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1998), 1. 30 For a journalistic discussion of the shoot in Israel, see Daniel Selznick, An Old Pro on the Go Again, New York Times Magazine, May 4, 1980, pp. 48ff. 31 Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: questions of meaning in contemporary culture (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1994), 113. 32 The exception to this is, of course, the World War I sequence with which the film begins. 33 Sam Fuller, The Big Red One (New York, Bantam, 1980), 434–435. 34 See Cornelia Brink for a useful discussion of the history of the term ‘icon’ and its relationship to concentration camp photography. Cornelia Brink, Secular icons: looking at photographs from Nazi concentration camps, History and Memory, 12(1) (Spring–Summer 2000). 35 It is worth noting that in A Third Face Fuller discusses this as a factual incident that he witnessed (214–215). The same goes for the Sergeant's attempted rescue mission after the liberation, which occurred with a young girl instead of a young boy (217–218). 36 Carol Zemel uses this term in Emblems of atrocity: Holocaust liberation photographs, in Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobwitz's Image and Remembrance (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 2004), 206. 37 Gary Weissman, A fantasy of witnessing, Media, Culture and Society, 17 (1995), 294. 38 Ibid., 294. 39 Ibid., 294 and 304. 40 Ibid., 306. 41 Claude Lanzmann, Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth, The Manchester Guardian Weekly (April 3, 1994), p. 14. 42 Fuller explains that making The Big Red One was ‘how I ultimately came to grips with my experience’ (ATF 122). 43 The Big Red One was drastically cut by the studio for its original release. For years, Fuller lamented this truncation of his epic vision of the war and Richard Schickel's reconstructed version adds over forty minutes to the original release print based upon Fuller's shooting script and rediscovered vault materials. 44 Fuller's reels of 16-mm footage from the war contain a good deal of similar clowning around, which is logical given the practicalities of when a soldier like Fuller would have had the time to shoot footage. Additionally, in his Falkenau reel there is a moment at which a group of American soldiers all look up at the camera and Fuller explains in Weiss's documentary that he ‘just told them to look at the camera,’ similarly directing the gazes and faces of his subjects. In the reconstructed release of The Big Red One the Fuller character keeps asking people to perform for the camera, in one instance instructing a little girl to look at his camera instead of at the 35mm that is clearly hovering in the non-diegetic space alongside him. 45 Toby Haggith, Filming the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Holocaust and the Moving Image: representations in film and television since 1933 (London, Wallflower, 2005), 34. 46 See ATF 510–511 for Fuller's discussion of his decision to share his 16-mm Falkenau footage with documentary film-maker Emil Weiss.