On Gershenson’s <em>The Phantom Holocaust</em>

Abstract

On Gershenson's The Phantom Holocaust The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe. By Olga Gershenson. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013. x + 276 pp., ISBN 978-0-8135- 6180-6 (pbk). US $32.50.Russian film scholar Oleg Aronson writes, Signs of films' times and epochs are fixed both in cinematic iconography and devices. Apart from images and rhetorical tropes, films contain imperceptible 'traces of a specific period' which speak even when all signs are silent. In Soviet cinema, he suggests, impacted perception of films a priori, forcing viewer to fill in blanks on level of both plot and imagery. Thus censorship in cinema in terms of how it operated under Soviets did possess, despite its ugliness, one positive factor: it imbued absences with a trace of positivity-in other words, with audience's active cultural and social imagination. 1It is useful to keep this framework in mind when reading Olga Gershenson's valuable pioneer survey of Holocaust theme on Soviet screens, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe. While her book discusses only those rare films that include specific references to Holocaust, as well as a number of unfilmed scripts, absences in these and other works take on a multilayered significance. We should also be reminded that, in words of Jean-Michel Frodon, the ethical thought of cinema will have been to a large extent thought for invisible.2 In context of history of Holocaust cinema, which painfully fluctuated between obsessing over documentary image and realizing its inadequacy and insufficiency, invisible becomes both a problem and a solution.Gershenson warns that her book is not about theoretical debates about limits and possibilities of Holocaust representation. . . . Soviet filmmakers might have contemplated whether and how to represent Holocaust, but ultimate answer was given by censor. Theoretical debate was beside point. . . . This means that film is crucial for understanding Holocaust representation in Soviet Union (8). Indeed. Yet if understood broadly, censorship-internal, financial, bureaucratic, and political-is crucial for understanding Holocaust representation globally and large chunks of cinematic history as a whole. It is also clear-and in fact Gershenson's meticulous research and fine analysis confirm this-that Soviet filmmakers she discusses absolutely did ponder question of how to represent atrocity and aesthetically resolved it, even if often in a truncated version. The multileveled debates at times pondered it as well. The absences, fragmentariness, and incompleteness that were ultimately presented to viewer can be mourned as testament to anti-Semitic Soviet policies, but should also be appreciated and theoretically contemplated as indelible parts of aesthetic texture of Soviet cultural and cinematic products.Gershenson's book is structured chronologically: from mediocre (28) prewar films, such as Professor Mamlock (Adolf Minkin, Gerbert Rappaport, USSR, 1938), which depicted early anti-Semitic policies in Germany; to immediate postwar era films, such as The Unvanquished (Mark Donskoi, USSR, 1945), with its scene of killings at Babi Yar; to cinema of Thaw, represented especially by Mikhail Kalik, Mikhail Romm, and Aleksandr Askol'dov; to films of last two decades of Soviet rule. She also discusses presence of Holocaust during Perestroika period and contemporary Russian cinema.Gerhsenson singles out universalization and externalization as two central aspects of Soviet treatment of Holocaust. The first approach meant that Jewish destruction was to be presented as part of overall Soviet tragedy during war; this led to almost complete, but gradual, official obfuscation of Holocaust and at times its sublimation on screen. …