It Looks Pretty from a Distance : Eco-memory and the Vitality of Holocaust Landscapes in Poland

Abstract

Abstract: Holocaust scholarship of the post-witness era has turned increasingly to environmental histories of the event as a means of implicating ecological sites and more-than-human lifeforms as powerful agents of memory. In this context, emergent concepts such as ecological memory and witnessing become useful paradigms for representing and remembering the Holocaust in places marked by the absence or erasure of human voices in particular. This article examines the role and representation of these concepts in Polish directors Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal's film It Looks Pretty from a Distance ( Z daleka widok jest piekny , 2011), in which ecological sites and landscapes bring the repressed local history of wartime Jewish murder and Catholic Polish collaboration to the surface of a provincial Polish community. I argue that the film reconceptualises humancentred notions of witnessing and testimony according to the theoretical works of Roseanne Kennedy and Shela Sheikh, and considers how Holocaust representation can portray the vitality of more-than-human ecological landscapes without their romanticisation.