Review: The Destruction of Memory, directed by Tim Slade

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Tim Slade, director The Destruction of Memory Icarus Films, New York, 2017, 85 min., http://icarusfilms.com/if-destr The 2017 documentary The Destruction of Memory , based on a book of the same title by architecture critic Robert Bevan, traces the history of the purposeful destruction of architecture, urban infrastructure, and monuments over the course of the twentieth century and into the early 2000s, through conflicts primarily in the Middle East and Europe.1 The film is a feat of archival research, pulling together footage from a number of events from the late nineteenth century forward. Its agenda is simple: to reveal that architecture and other cultural artifacts are frequently strategic targets of war and that their destruction is often more than mere collateral damage. Through interviews with a wide-ranging group of experts in the international arena—lawyers, preservation officers, historians, politicians, and architects—supported by archival photographs and footage, Tim Slade, the film's writer and director, tells a vivid and absorbing story of the deliberate destruction of cultural monuments and the emergence of legal frameworks and institutions designed to protect them. The creation and enforcement of those laws has been and remains the responsibility of a host of largely anonymous bureaucrats. To lay the groundwork, the film opens with perhaps the best known of these, Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish lawyer who is widely credited with coining the term genocide . The film's argument takes as its starting point Lemkin's assertion of a distinction between two forms of genocide: physical and cultural. After experiencing the atrocities of World War I as a child in his native Poland, Lemkin conceived and advocated for legislation and policy to recognize and deal with the perpetrators of mass destruction. Following the war, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties was created by the Allies to enumerate a list of war crimes, determine breaches of …