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This multi-modal project, composed of the following paper and the video essay “The Archival In-Between,” reflects on the connection between the concepts of trace and gaze as analytical paradigms of dealing with the (visual) memory of the Holocaust.

A comprehensive list of archival film material related to the genocide and an extensive thematic bibliography accompanied by an article that problematizes atrocity film and suggests to approach it through the concept of forensic cinema.

Since SS camp personnel obeyed the strict prohibition against photography in Nazi annihilation, concentration, and work camps, the footage that Allied cameramen shot in such camps during and shortly after their liberation filled this void in visual documentation. Thus, what we imagine went on in Nazi camps while in operation has been shaped by pictures that document their very last stages. So, though the arrival of Allied soldiers was a turning point for survivors, the film that Allied cameramen shot in those days tells us more about the effects of Nazi terror than about survivors’ liberation from it.

In recent decades filmmakers, film scholars, and historians have modified their understanding of how to work with documentary film images. Robert A. Rosenstone identified one of the main assumptions of the new perspective as early as 1988.

In October 2006, Harun Farocki and I had almost missed each other in the Index Gallery, Stockholm, at a crowded reception in his honour after the opening of GEGEN-MUSIK (COUNTER-MUSIC, D/F 2004). In the subsequent e-mail exchange, Farocki wanted to know what I could tell him about a film made at Westerbork, the transit camp run by the SS during Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands.