Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema: Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge

Matilda Mroz's Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema examines how Polish cinema negotiates "unwanted knowledge" concerning Polish wartime crimes committed on Jewish "neighbors." The book is an original and important contribution to the field of Holocaust cinema studies that have developed so far in two main directions: general surveys of films examining the experience of the Holocaust and case studies of specific works informed mostly by theories of trauma and (post)memory. Mroz explores a new area within the field in that she employs concepts of philosophically oriented film theory in the close analysis of four films: Birthplace Miejsce urodzenia; Paweł Łoziński, Poland, 1992, Aftermath Pokłosie; Władysław Pasikowski, Poland/Russia/Netherlands, 2012, Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland/ Denmark/France/UK, 2013), and It Looks Pretty from a Distance Z daleka widok jest piękny; Wilhelm Sasnal and Anka Sasnal, Poland, 2011. While acknowledging various differences between these films, Mroz argues that they establish the process of "coming-to-know" the histories of Polish violent actions against Polish Jews during the Holocaust and its aftermath. Taking inspirations from epistemological and ethical concepts developed by Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi- Huberman, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, Kaja Silverman, and others, the author claims that the selected films negotiate "unwanted knowledge" of the past (and present) Polish-Jewish relationship.The book is composed of six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter, "Polish Aftermath Cinema: Unwanted Knowledge, Unwanted Images," presents the historical and cultural contexts for the subsequent close analyses of the films. It begins with a brief discussion of Agnieszka Arnold's documentary, . . . Where is My Older Son Cain? . . . Gdzie mój starszy syn Kain?; Poland, 1999, the first Polish film referring to the massacre of Jews committed by Poles in Jedwabne in 1941. Although the film did not resonate with the Polish audience at the time of its release, it served as a direct source of inspiration for Jan T. Gross's book, Neighbors Sąsiedzi, 2000, that ignited a heated public debate on Polish participation in the Holocaust. As Mroz explains, both the film and the book offered for the first time "unwanted knowledge" of Polish acts of violence committed against Jews during World War II, and as such they initiated the process of "coming-to-know" that has been constantly fluctuating in response to the changing political climate and hegemonic ideological frameworks. Consequently, the erstwhile dominant, in Polish discourse, figure of a noble, compassionate, yet helpless Polish victim has been gradually vanishing. Instead, as the chapter argues, "unwanted knowledge" has emerged in the cinematic landscapes of the films that are discussed in the subsequent parts of the book.In chapter 2, "Earth and Bone: Framing Posthumous Materialities," Mroz outlines the methodological approach employed in the book. From the intersection of selected philosophical frameworks and the concept of anamorphosis conceived as a structure of knowing and seeing, she looks at various texts, public discussions, and visual representations as these engage with Polish violence towards Polish Jews. Special attention is given to landscape, especially the "non-sites of memory" (a term coined by Roma Sendyka) signifying unmarked sites of Polish violence committed against Jews. For these analyses, Mroz proposes to enter the fields of forensics, archaeology, and the posthumanities as these prove especially useful in mobilizing the structure of anamorphosis, producing a radical change of perspective on the experience of the Holocaust.Chapter 3, "Posthumous Landscapes and the Earth-Archive: Archaeology, Ethics and Birthplace," examines Łoziński's Birthplace, a documentary depicting the Holocaust survivor Henryk Grynberg's return to the Polish village where he had hidden during World War II. The film records the process of his discovery that his father and his younger brother were killed by their Polish neighbors and buried in an unmarked grave. The chapter focuses on two key elements: the face and the home. The former is used in the Levinasian sense as a "site of ethical encounter" that is manifested through Grynberg's confrontations with the village people. These encounters that always take place within the domestic space establish the negated concept of home. As Mroz succinctly explains, Grynberg's return to his birthplace involves both familiarity and alienation, which can be extrapolated, I believe, onto the more general issue of Jewish presence in Polish landscape as being both present and erased.Chapter 4, "Aftermath's Cinematic Séance: Anamorphosis, Spectrality, and Sentient Matter," discusses how the structure of anamorphosis combined with the Derridean concept of spectrality reframes the fictional characters of Pasikowski's film and (potentially) the viewers' perspective on the past Polish-Jewish relationship, specifically the continuation of the cycles of violence. As Mroz argues, past violence does not return as immaterial trauma or memory but rather as a structure that materializes in the present.Discussion of how the violent past resonates in the present is continued in chapter 5, "The Fabric with Its Rend: Framing Grief, Materialising Loss and Ida's Temporalities." While taking inspiration from Eugenie Brinkema's writing on grief, Mroz examines how Pawlikowski's film evokes it in cinematic form, especially in framing and composition. According to the author, Ida offers to the viewer a materialist meditation on loss, while not providing closure that is connected with the complexity of Polish-Jewish relationships during World War II and its aftermath. The film "continually braids knowledge and not-knowledge together" reflecting contemporary Polish discourse on the troublesome past (p. 181).The film discussed in the last chapter, "A Film Found on a Scrapheap: Abjection, Informe and It Looks Pretty from a Distance," does not mention the Holocaust or its aftermath, yet, as Mroz claims, it is an important meditation on unwanted knowledge concerning Polish violence directed at (Jewish) Others. The chapter looks at the Sasnals' film through the prism of such theoretical concepts as allegory, abjection, and formlessness. On the one hand, It Looks Pretty from a Distance shows continuities between the past and present violence; on the other hand, it demonstrates the impossibility of finding coherent meanings or affective structures behind these "unacknowledged continuities."While discussing It Looks Pretty from a Distance, Mroz pays attention to the issue of depicting Polish peasants in an elitist fashion. She writes: "the film also problematically encourages viewers to enact their own process of abjection in rejecting these 'primitive' villagers as not like us. This strategy runs the risk of allowing the question of Polish wartime actions, complicity, and responsibility to be projected onto something that can be pushed away" (p. 243). Although this representational pattern is especially visible in the Sasnals' film, it is employed in the other three films examined in the book as well. Polish violent antisemitism is located in rural Poland and the featured villages are presented as almost excavated from the past, with its clichéd primitivism and backwardness. Arguably, while offering a paramount meditation on Polish violence perpetrated against Jews, these films also relegate these abominable acts to rural Poland and its peasant inhabitants. These geopolitical operations and clichéd images of peasantry require more attention, and it seems that the concepts of allegory and abjection are insufficient to grasp the complexity of the socio-political dynamism of Polish antisemitism.Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema discusses the as yet unexplored topic of Polish cinema's representation of Polish violence towards Polish Jews during the Holocaust and its aftermath. The book expertly combines philosophically oriented film theory with current scholarship on the Holocaust, which results in insightful analyses of the cinematic process of "coming-to-know" about Polish atrocities committed during World War II and how these reverberate in the present. Mroz's book contributes to the ongoing debate on the troublesome relationship between non-Jewish Poles and Polish Jews, while offering a nuanced film analysis that expertly and beautifully incorporates philosophical frameworks to address cinematic form and its affective potential. Due to its broad scope and comprehensive film analyses, the book will be useful for advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars working in the fields of film studies, Holocaust studies, Slavic studies, and Jewish studies.I would like to end this review on a personal note as I have read Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema not only as a film scholar but also as a Pole who still struggles with the historical past and its present reverberations. I still remember how shocked I was after reading Gross's Neighbors in 2000. It echoed my astonishment after reading Jan Błoński's article, "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto" Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto, published in Tygodnik Powszechny in 1987, which claimed that being a passive witness could be seen as complicity in the Holocaust. These two texts practically ruined the historical education I received during the period of state socialism in Poland. I learned that Poles were not just noble suffering victims but victimizers as well. I needed time to come to terms with these aspects of Polish history, and I am still working through this new perspective on the collective past. I am still in the process of "coming-to-know." Mroz's book is an important step on this path towards accepting "unwanted knowledge."