Cold War cinema and the traumatic turn in Europe: Fact (1980) as a Soviet mirror of the Holocaust film

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe polarisation of WWII memory across the West and East of Europe is an enduring legacy of the Cold War. In the West, the genocide of the Jews was narrated into public memory as the defining trauma of the war and the foundation of cosmopolitan identity, with cinema playing a key role. After Stalin, Soviet cinema supplemented portrayals of monumental triumph with explorations of the personal, everyday experience of trauma. However, the Holocaust was not part of the picture, insofar as Jewish particularism was marginalised in Soviet trauma narratives of WWII, which focused rather on the internationalist ethos of communist martyrs. In time, however, this internationalism drifted towards nativism, manifest in a thematic focus on the burning of villages by German forces as an act of genocide. Soviet Lithuanian artists and filmmakers were at the centre of these developments, and their memoirs shed light on how the nativist vector of the Soviet ‘trauma drama’ of WWII developed through representations of the destruction of the village of Pirčiupiai in monument, poetry and the feature film Fact (Faktas, dir. A. Grikevičius, 1980). Presented as an orthodox rendition of the Great Patriotic War narrative, the film served as a screen memory for a nativist articulation of collective identity.