Son of Saul and the ethics of representation: troubling the figure of the child

Amanda Howell,Margaret Gibson

doi:10.5130/csr.v24i2.6056

Abstract

Taking László Nemes’ film Son of Saul (2015) as both an aesthetic intervention into the public remembering of the Holocaust and as a critical/creative essay on representations of the horrors of war and violence more generally, this paper considers its use of the image and idea of the dead child—the child victim—and its ability to move, to communicate, to galvanise action, to seemingly cut through the chaos of communication. A figure presented as tangible and mournable in a way that the many anonymous, barely-glimpsed and largely ignored dead of the film are not, we consider it in relation to previous representations of the child in Holocaust film, but also, importantly, in relation to contemporary photographic examples of the child victim-as-icon, whose images seemingly require no caption to communicate and which inspire deeply-felt responses across cultures, organising structures of public feeling. As Nemes’ film makes clear, the claim of the child victim on the witness is profound, immediate, and potentially transformative. We will consider how the image of the child operates as a fluid signifier of both hope and despair, shared desires and fears, a not-unproblematic image through which the obscene and the unthinkable are mediated and made visible.

Highlights

Son of Saul, Holocaust Memory, and Cultures of Witnessing in the era of YouTube Abraham Warszawski: Who’s this boy?Saul Ausländer: My son.Abraham Warszawski: But you have no son.Saul Ausländer: I do
YouTube has moved Holocaust witnessing beyond those forms of curatorial and representational control offered by the museum and the documentary, into a post-sacred realm where images of horror and violence are no longer set apart or quarantined from media publics of denial, appropriation and exploitation, its material artefacts duplicated, mediated by paratexts of likes and dislikes, the commentary space, and the distractions of advertising click-bait
The familiar/familial was a key resonating affective trope in the movement of his image in political discourses with world leaders such as British Prime Minister David Cameron responding as a father and thereby self-constituting his moral political role within an affective frame of parental love and responsibility for the child.49 (Alan Kurdi by Nilüfer Demir: DHA/ Doğan News Agency, 2 September 2015, re-tweet by Liz Sly here.) The restaging of Alan Kurdi’s body as a peacefully asleep child with the props and comforts of a child’s bedroom brought the uncanny to affective, unsettling familiarity